In May 2021, after nearly three years of work, Dr Naomi Richards and I finally saw our article Death Café, Bauman and Striving for Human Connection in “Liquid Times”published in the journal Mortality. In the article, we offer a new, critical, and perhaps provocative perspective on the role that Death Café gatherings play and the purpose they… Continue reading →
Several years ago, I started hearing about a new kind of community-based care role. Some called themselves ‘end-of-life doula’; others identified themselves as a ‘death doula’ or a ‘death midwife’. These terms describe people (primarily women) who provide a wide range of social, emotional, practical, and spiritual supports for people nearing the end of life,… Continue reading →
Dr. Marian Krawczyk and Dr. Haruka Hikasa Mitori Project The Mitori Project was a multidisciplinary project examining end of life issues in the UK and Japan, led by Professor David Clark. It brought together academics from both countries using perspectives of social science, humanities, and ethics to examine how care of people at the end… Continue reading →
In December we published the overall results from the third ‘world map’ of palliative care development, showing that only a small proportion of the global population, mostly in the global North, live in countries with the most advanced provision of palliative care. We can now present our assessment of global levels of children’s palliative care… Continue reading →
Before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted conventional thinking around death and dying, Death Cafés around the world were encouraging people to reflect on their mortality. Death Cafés are informal social spaces where strangers meet to ‘have a conversation’ about death and dying. They can be organised by anyone, anywhere in the world. With death rates now… Continue reading →
Even at The Lancet When it comes to assisted dying, even one of the world’s leading medical journals can get caught out. It’s curious in this age of ‘precision medicine’, that leading commentators and thought leaders in the medical field can still struggle with crucial terms and definitions about assisted dying. Whatever your views on… Continue reading →
“Death is terrifying”, writes the author Susan Cheever, “…because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time”. Continue reading →
In the summer of 2018, Dr Marian Krawczyk and I co-authored an article about how the various western cultural ‘scripts’ which give meaning to dying might be influenced when assisted dying is made lawful and the very end stages of dying becomes, in essence, an ‘optional’ part of the lifecourse. Our thinking was very much… Continue reading →
