What happens when hundreds gather to talk about death?
Laughter. Connection. Radical bravery. And the reminder that grief and joy belong in the same room.
A moving write-up from @usatoday reporter @doliver8 — full story in our bio!
“There would be no ‘healing.’ No return to who we were. Those people died at the exact moment our child did,” Danielle Crittenden writes of losing her daughter, and herself.
“Maternal grief seizes the body differently from other sorrows. The attachment to our child begins at conception,” Crittenden continues. “Fetal cells migrate during pregnancy, taking up residence in the mother’s brain and organs. The child’s cells can remain in the mother for as long as she lives. They can help her fight off illness, recover from surgery. I find this infinitely comforting: Even after death, Miranda remains alive within me, her cells woven through my brain and blood.”
Read the full piece at the link in our bio!
A thought from @cheng_ruan_md we keep coming back to:
One way to honor someone you’ve lost is to take care of yourself.
In the everyday ways: Eating. Resting. Letting yourself feel what you feel. Giving yourself a little more patience than usual.
It’s a way of carrying them with you as you keep going, and sometimes that’s exactly what honoring them looks like.
We love this obituary, shared by @TipsFromDeadPeople
“Being good isn’t about being spotless. It’s about being honest and sticking around long enough to do better.”
Mother’s Day can hold a lot at once.
Love and loss. Gratitude and longing. Celebration and silence.
For some, it’s a day to honor. For others, it’s a day to get through. For many, it’s both.
This piece from Dr. Laura Berman offers a few ways to make space for whatever shows up. Simple, human things. Let it hurt. Tend to your body. Mark the day in your own way. Reach out, or don’t.
However today unfolds, you get to move through it in your own way.
Read Laura's full piece at the link in our bio!
@ericareitman thought that first Mother’s Day would wreck her. Everyone said it would.
But it didn’t.
And that was strange in its own way. Grief didn’t land on the day she was bracing for. It showed up in smaller, quieter moments instead.
If this weekend feels heavy, or totally fine, or somewhere in between… that all tracks.
He knew where he wanted to die.
In Barbados. By the sea. In the company of his wife and closest friends.
Former End Well speaker Michael Murphy writes about his father’s death as the search for “the last room.” The place where someone spends their final hours, and how much that place can matter. The chair. The light. The surroundings that made it possible for him to let go.
Most people don’t have much say in this. It often comes down to where care is available, rather than where someone wants to be.
But what Murphy is naming is something more specific: the role of place itself. How the environments we die in shape the experience, just as much as the care we receive.
Read the full piece at the link in our bio!
August de los Reyes was passionate about proving that disability isn’t located in the body, but rather a mismatch between a person and the world around them. That single reframe changes everything. Design stops asking “what’s wrong with you?” and starts asking: Who are we excluding? Where? And how do we fix it?
The answers don’t just serve the people being left out, they make the world better for everyone.
In this clip from End Well 2019, August takes us through that shift. It’s the same thinking he brought to Microsoft, Google, Pinterest, and Varo — building for the full range of human experience, not as an afterthought, but as the starting point.
August died in 2020 from complications of COVID.
Watch his full talk at the link in our bio.
We’ve edited the word “dying” out of our language. Replaced it with “passed,” “seriously ill,” anything softer.
In this 2019 BBC clip, palliative care doctor and former End Well speaker Kathryn Mannix argues it’s time to break the taboo around death.
When writer Catherine Renton’s mom died, nothing about it felt clear or explained. It was overwhelming, disorienting, and far messier than the way we tend to talk about death.
In the aftermath, she kept coming back to the same questions: why doesn’t anyone prepare you for this? And why is there so little support for the people left behind?
Years later, she made a decision she never would have predicted. She trained to become a death doula.
Now she’s the one sitting with families in those moments, helping them understand what’s happening, answering questions they didn’t know to ask, and staying present in a time that can feel impossible to steady.
It’s a role more people are starting to name. Even Nicole Kidman has spoken about beginning that training after her own mother’s death, wishing someone like that had been there.
The phenomenon speaks to something simple: how much it matters to have someone there who understands what you’re going through.
Check out Catherine’s full piece at the link in our bio!
Most of us won’t die suddenly.
We’ll live with something - heart disease, cancer, dementia, any number of conditions that unfold slowly over time. And as they do, our bodies begin to change in ways that can feel confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
There are patterns to dying. There are ways the body begins to wind down. And when we don’t understand them, it’s easy to think something has gone terribly wrong, when in fact, the body may be doing exactly what it’s built to do.
Palliative Care Physician @sammy.winemaker walks through what that can look like, from illness, from aging, from the long arc of a life coming to a close.
We tend to have a lot of expectations around last words. Like they’re supposed to land perfectly, say something that ties everything together. But often, there aren’t words.
“Dying is not a particularly talkative time.”
Language fades. Attention comes and goes. There’s confusion. There’s silence. And still—people are there with each other. A hand squeeze. A look. Sitting in the room.
For linguist Michael Erard, learning this was clarifying. Having the right expectations is where care begins.
Watch his full talk at the link in our bio!
