Ted Audio Collective.

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You're listening to Ted Talks Daily,

I'm Elise Hugh.

Despite our cultural discomfort with it, listening to TED Talks Daily, I'm Elise Hugh.

Despite our cultural discomfort with it,

we're going to die.

I am, you are, it's bound to happen.

In palliative care consultant, Catherine Mannix

has attended many deaths.

She reminds us that there's a process to it, much like there's a process to birth.

And in her 2022 talk from Ted X Newcastle, she makes a case for why all of us should understand death well enough to describe it.

After the break.

Human beings are the only animals capable of contemplating their own mortality

and they've been doing that for thousands of years.

And yet somehow... for thousands of years.

And yet somehow in the very recent past, we have lost the practical wisdom

of what happens as people die. I think that that's a problem. And if you agree

with me that it is a problem then we have to work out what we're going to do about it.

When she was in her mid-20s, my grandmother was already deeply familiar with the sequence of events that happened

to a human person as they were coming to the end of their life.

And that's because as a woman, and it was usually women's work she was doing

...