HNP: It was more like ‘What if I die and there’s nothing else? Like, what if there’s just nothing?’ I didn’t think a lot about the actual process of dying, I just worried about what would happen after I died. I also wanted to help people overcome their death anxiety more generally, because I suffered from death anxiety when I was in my thirties.ĮF: Were you afraid of dying, or were you just afraid you were going to die badly? If you see something happening to your dying person, and you no one has ever told you that it’s normal, that can be very scary. And most of the time, it’s because they don’t know what to expect. I’ve seen a lot of trauma around death, not only for the person who is dying, but for the family who is experiencing that journey with them. On social media, I’m trying to help to remove the stigma around hospice, to get a conversation going about death and dying so as to normalize it, because I know that if you can get to a place of acceptance, you will have a better death. I’ve been a hospice nurse for 17 years in a variety of different roles within hospice. Hospice Nurse Penny (HNP): My name is Penny, and I am a Certified Hospice and Palliative Care Nurse in Seattle, WA. Can you tell us what you do exactly and why? A star, the queen of TikTok death talk! Some of your videos have gone viral. And then you popped up as a whole other phenomenon. I immediately reached out to her and this was our conversation.Įlle Flanders (EF): As a slightly younger older person, or maybe I’m an older younger person, I was very excited to see all the things that are happening on social media around death and dying. She is provocative and unlike anything I’ve seen in the field. She sometimes wears scrubs, but also costumes. Sure, it can be a refuge for cat videos, or a viral hit where 5.3 million people watch a video of – a couple drinking coffee? But its seemingly random format can also be an opportunity, as when I stumbled across the TikTok account Penny’s videos are often funny and definitely strange. Here, it seems to me, social media can be useful, an instrument that so often delivers information we may not have known we were seeking. What about people who aren’t aware there is a conversation to be had? The great majority of people who don’t know that knowledge about death and dying will at some point prove useful to them? There are, of course, chat rooms, websites and podcasts dedicated to death and dying, but the people who turn to these resources in general tend to be part of that conversation already. My mother’s mission was to bring awareness about death and dying to people outside the medical world as well as to those inside the medical field who need reminding that we all do reach an end.īecause as we removed death from the lifecycle – note our stress on ‘life’ – we have become unaware, and therefore fearful, and silent. Not just as a way to understand her, but as a way to complete this circle of life. I have also found myself deep in her work on Palliative Care. Searching for missing pieces of her life that I didn’t know about, for pieces of paper with her handwriting, for faces in photos who might give me a clue as to what might complete her for me. Ever since my mother’s death I have found myself searching.
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