April 15, 2025 • 31 mins
Dying well
We’re all going to die, but how we acknowledge death and dying is a very personal experience. Award-winning journalist and author Tracey Spicer and anthropologist Dr Hannah Gould explore etiquette, rites and traditions to find out what makes a ‘good death’.
About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors.
Join James Valentine for the sixth season of Life’s Booming: Dying to Know, our most unflinching yet. We’ll have the conversations that are hardest to have, ask the questions that are easy to ignore, and hear stories that will make you think differently about the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience: Death.
Featuring interviews with famous faces as well as experts in the space, we uncover what they know about what we can expect. There are hard truths, surprising discoveries, tears and even laughs. Nothing about death is off the table.
Tracey Spicer AM is a Walkley award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster. And she's an ambassador for Dying With Dignity. A vocal campaigner and advocate for voluntary assisted dying (VAD), Tracey penned a letter to her mother following her painful death in 1999.
Dr Hannah Gould is an anthropologist who works in the areas of death, religion and material culture. She recently appeared on SBS documentary: Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye. Hannah’s research spans new traditions and technologies of Buddhist death rites, the lifecycle of religious materials, and modern lifestyle movements.
If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note – lifesbooming@seniors.com.au
Watch Life’s Booming on YouTube
Listen to Life's Booming on Apple Podcasts
Listen to Life's Booming on Spotify
For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast
Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel
Disclaimer: Please be advised that this episode contains discussions about death, which may be triggering or upsetting for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
If you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, please know that you are not alone and there are resources available. For additional support please contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.
TRANSCRIPT:
James: We're all going to die. Happens to all of us. But how we acknowledge death and dying is of course a very personal experience. With our guest and our expert, we're going to explore the etiquette, the rites and traditions seen in Australia and around the world. Someone who knows a lot about the rites and traditions of death is Dr Hannah Gould, an anthropologist who works in the areas of death, religion and material culture.
We're also going to be joined by Tracey Spicer, she’s a Wal
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Dying is inevitable. It happens to all of us, but
how we acknowledge death and dying is a very personal experience.
With our guests and expert, we'll explore the etiquette, rights
and traditions seen in multicultural Australia and around the world.
Someone who knows about the rights and traditions is doctor
Hannah Gould, an anthropologist working in the areas of death,
(00:27):
religion and material culture. We're also going to be joined
by Tracy Spicer and she's a walk They Award winning author,
journalist and broadcaster, and she's an ambassador for dying with dignity.
Tracy and Hannah welcome, Thanks so much. Hello, Hello, thank
you for coming. Thank you fantastic. Let's talk death.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Why not lots of fun?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You laugh in the face of death.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
What else can you do? I mean, look, you know,
lots of sadness, lots of joy, every single emotion. It's reasonable, surely.
I mean, it's like the question, the ultimate question of
philosophy of history of every one, every response is valid,
not always useful or helpful, but valid. Well, it's a
universal topic of conversation, and that's why I've always loved
(01:10):
dark humor. Because you do have to laugh otherwise what
do you do?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I also think it is the ultimate joke that we
are all going to die, but we live like we're
not going to We live every day as though it's
just not going to happen at all.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Especially in Western society.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I think other cultures have got it right, and we're
in such deep denial about it. It's detrimental to all
of us.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Now this is your area expertise, really is it? Do
other cultures have it right?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Everyone does it differently, right or wrong is kind of
a difficult thing to judge. I think certainly there's a
big thing called like the denial of death thesis right,
and people inspec are a lot of different philosophers and
anthropologists and cultural analysis have looked at Western culture and gone,
oh my gosh, we are so invested in denying death
right and whether that's through denying death by religions that
(02:00):
say you're going to live forever, like, you know, don't worry,
it's not the end, You're off to heaven or whatever
it is, or through you know, great heroic myths. Yes
you'll die, but the nation will remember you forever, so
you know, you won't really die. You'll be a mader
or contemporary. You know, yes, you'll die, but have you
seen how great the shopping is? You know, we can
just ignore, we can deny it and death by being
(02:21):
on Instagram and you know consuming right. So I think
Western culture, in particular, the way we've organized our society
allows us to not think about death.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And we've organized death to be somewhere else, used in there,
to be at the hospital, to be in pallative care, somewhere.
And they may be good, but they're not. They're not
in the cottage, are they. They're not next to it,
not in the bedroom, not in the bedroom.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So we know that say seventy percent of Australians wish
to die at home, only about fifteen percent, and that
is a rate that is lower than all these other
countries we like to compare ourselves. So Australians are more
institutionalized in their death than places like Ireland, like New Zealand,
the United States of America, even Canada. We tend more
than other countries to die in institutions and aged care,
(03:03):
hospitals and hospices.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, the other way in which we deny death is
or the other way in which other cultures have a
different attitude to death, will be that lit'll be to
be more accepting we are all going to die, will
be part of their every day, or they may have
a notion of reincarnation and coming back, which means that
that's a very different attitude to death really than a
heaven and a hell.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, it's not necessarily an end so much. I think
that's kind of quite common in saying, you know, Buddhist
or Hindu or other kind of dharmic religions, particularly Asian religions.
And then obviously there's a lot of Asian religion that's
part of a Sustralian society, so that's also quite present
in Australia. But we can also have a kind of
more secular idea about that. You know, a lot of
is a lot of my mum's generation in particular, have
(03:45):
quite a green, environmental kind of reincarnation model where she
will say, well, I don't particularly believe in heaven, but
I do believe I'm going to become compost food for worms.
You know, I'll come back as a tree or a
flower or a tomato plant, you know, and that's the
that's the kind of reincarnation of like reintegration into the
natural environment, as it were. So there are some kind
(04:06):
of myths or stories we can tell ourselves that perhaps
help us think about death.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, I've got a friend of mine and into our
eighties it said our funeral, just putab me at the
top paddic, let the crows ever go.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
My dad was to be buried in a cardboard box.
Surely that's a wonderful Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, we all say that, don't we. That's a really
common one as well. I hear that a lot of
the radio people will go, mate, just I don't get
put me out with that on the hard rubbish jack
whatever the thing I said, you know, like, do we
really want that?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Do you think? Ah, do we really want that? I
do think Ossie's are pretty pragmatic about death. I do
think we have a certain streak in us that's kind
of like, you know what, it's all a bit much fast,
it's all too much. You can't even get these people
who therefore say, don't have a funeral. You know, I
really don't want to have a funeral. Please don't even
know no fuss. That can be kind of sad sometimes
because I think it's some people kind of not acknowledging
(04:54):
how many people love them and miss them. But maybe
it's also a bit of an Aussie humored humor, that
black humor again, of kind of you know, trying to
laugh in the face of death.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I would agree, But then we all get sucked in
when we're in the funeral home and they show you
the cardboard box and then they show you the glossy
one that's ten or twenty thousand dollars, and you think,
did I really love that person that much?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And should I do it?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So it all feeds into what you were talking about before,
that consumerism and over commercialization.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Well, I also think sometimes I would think it's about weddings,
weddings and funerals. Well, who's it actually for.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Well, it's a punctuation mark, isn't it. I'm a lifelong atheist,
but I do enjoy it. Sounds terrible going to those
kind of ceremonies, whether it's a funeral or a wedding,
because it's important to celebrate and commemorate these changes, these
huge changes.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I love the sharing of stories at a funeral. People
start talking.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Well, you learn so much about someone's life that you
may not have known. And also often they're rich for
that dark humor. I'll never forget my grandmother's funeral, who
I was incredibly closed to, and my father's new girlfriend
loved my grandmother. She was so distraught she tried to
throw herself into the hole in the ground on top
(06:11):
when she was throwing the dirt in, and I thought, well,
that's eat heads, that's good. That's I've never seen that before.
That's a first I've seen that before.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I will say that. You know, when you attend enough
funerals or attend enough cremations for professional reasons as it were,
you kind of see everything, every range of human emotions,
like we kind of think, you know, all funerals are
all happy families, a lot of unhappy families, a lot
of punch ups at funerals, lots of mistresses coming out
of the woodwork at funerals, conversions religious, you know. More
(06:42):
and more people have recorded messages from beyond the graves
that they play at their funeral, or they've decided that
we're having a dance party, or we're having some sort
of festivity or an event. I mean, you can do
anything in stays with it.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Do you go to a lot to just observe?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, I do my research. So I research and death,
and and I work at a crematorium, and I attend funerals,
and I hang around with other people in the death
care sector, and you do see everything.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What do you want to be interested in? You've done this? Well,
why do you want to be around death?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I mean personal and professional professional? I'm an anthropologist, and
anthropologists want to know what brings us together, what makes
us all human? But then also why we do it
so differently? And there is nothing else. It is the question, right,
It is the one thing we all experience, and yet
we've all decided to do it in completely different ways
and completely different ways throughout history. And then personally, my
(07:40):
dad died and I thought, gosh, what on earth is
going on? I suddenly was given the catalog of funeral.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Of coffins, right, and you were young?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I was twenty two, twenty three. My dad died, an
age that was perfectly old and mature at the time,
I thought, but looking back obviously was incredibly young. But yeah,
I suddenly I got handed this catalog of kind of
coffins and they all had these really naf names, like
you know, there's Rich Mahoganies and like it was like
paint colors. Someone had, someone somewhere had decided these were
(08:12):
the options, right that you were, this is what was
going to represent my dad, And I just felt this
massive disconnect and I thought, hang on, I've got to
work out what's going on there. So now I spent
my life in death.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, I suppose most of us think being around death
would be a very gloomy kind of thing to be
the way to spend your day.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It can be very gloomy. But oh my gosh, the
gullos humor that those boys in the crem the crematorium
tell yeah, you know you're joking, tin ooh. Not a
lot of them are safe for work or anywhere.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You were going to jump in our before what are
we going to ask? You know, fellow fellow professional interviewer.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I really see a connection with you being twenty two
when your father died, and I was thirty two when
my mother died. Even at thirty two, I felt like
I was so ready for it, and especially because it
happened so quickly. Mum was the lynchpin for the family.
You know, I was smart and funny, and she could
do anything. She was one of those early superwomen kind
(09:09):
of role models, and then all of a sudden, at
the age of fifty one, she was diagnosed with pancreatic
cancer with seven months to live, and she lived seven months,
almost to the day, and it was blood and guts
and gore. She was an agonizing pain. My sister and
I were injecting her with medication every day. We wanted
her to die in the home, but it got to
(09:30):
the stage we had to bring her to palliative care.
And that's when we started having the conversations about voluntary
a sister dying because Mum and Dad had always said,
put me down like a dog. And again, it's one
of those things that you think it's going to be
easy at the time, but it's not. We talked to
the doctor. The doctor said, I don't want to end
up in jail, and my sister sat there with the
morphine button. She pressed it so off and she had
(09:52):
a bruise on her thumb, and we said, surely you
can just increase the more thing. Because Mum was having
breakthrough pain, so everything was fine until she'd scream once
an hour and there was no way they could cap that.
So it's cruel, right, that's cruel. I don't think there's
any way they would have done it. We tried to
have those conversations, which is why one night, because we
were sleeping in a chair next to her over and
(10:15):
I just hold her hand. When she was in pain,
I picked up the pillow and I did try to
put it over her face because I thought, what kind
of daughter am I to let her suffer? And then
I stopped at the last minute, and then I felt
really ashamed of you know, no, but what a coward
I am, not.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
To say, at the opposite, what an incredibly brave act
to have so much love and compassion for this person
and so much respect what you knew her wishes would
be that you were willing to do that, you know,
not for her, not to her.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
For her that's extraordinary, But she's lovely For you to say,
did she know what you were doing?
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Oh no, She was out of it for about the
previous two weeks, action in and out of it, and
then she died in the next twenty five hours anyway,
so she was very very close, and she'd had that
kind of burst, you know how, They had that almost
done even period a couple of days beforehand. We think
what she seems like she's getting better, and we read
about that final burst. Yeah, is there a name for that?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
You know, I don't know what it's called, but you
know that is when usually the parlative care doctors, the
hospice workers will call up the family and say, guess
what they're up and about. They're talking, they're eating. All
of a sudden, that's genuinely usually a sign that it's
not going to be long.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Wow, isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
It's the final burst of energy. One of the interesting
things about the rise of voluntary assisted dying, of euthanasia,
to speak more broadly in Australia, is it reflects this
kind of cultural shift that we have about the importance
of choice and control towards the end of our life,
and how increasingly like that is becoming an important part
of what we think about as a good death right,
(11:52):
like I want to be able to control where I
die and who I die with than when and the
pain and suffering. Right, And that hasn't always been the case, right,
you know, throughout history, and there's been periods of that.
There's been periods of leave it to God, or there's
also been periods of yes, I must prepare, I have
to like write my final last note or poetry or
whatever it is. But that's increasingly becoming important, particularly for
(12:15):
we see within the baby boomer generation that they really
want to you know, have some sort of choice. And
emphasis on choice.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Well, I mean, I wonder whether a lot of it
is a reaction to the medical control over the end
of our lives is so extreme that we can be
kept alive for so long, and so it's a reaction
to that medical control is to want to say, well,
surely we can have both. Well, you're going to either
keep me alive. If I don't want to be kept alive,
(12:42):
could you let me go?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
It's one of the great paradoxes they've talked about. This
paradox of contemporary death and contemporary medicine is that all
of our interventions have increased, Right, the medicalization of death
has meant that not only have pain control, but we
can keep people alive for longer. You know, we have
better medicines, drugs, palliated. Medicine is massively advanced. And yet
if we ask people, the quality of death and dying
(13:05):
has not increased. And if we look globally, more access
to medicine doesn't necessarily correlate with a higher quality of
death and dying. There's some correlation like do you actually
have the drugs? Can you access them? But when it
gets to kind of over a certain hurdle. Just because
you're dying in Australia versus dying in a country with
no resources doesn't mean you're going to die better.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
What do you what's a quality of death? How are
we measuring that? What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
There's lots of things you can do to measure and
people try so one of them is, you know, to
ask us the family, to ask the dying person, to
also ask the physician, did you think this was a
good death? You know, how do we assess it? Because
it's not just up to the dying person as well,
of course, it's also up to the family, Right, how
did you experience that death? That dying? It's a difficult
(13:52):
thing to measure, right because for some people death is
never going to be you know, the words good death
bad death are kind of controversial now, business like, oh
my god, I have to try and everything else. I
also have to live up to a good death, right,
Like we can't make it good? Can we make it better?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Is a good death? Tracy.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I think this really intersects with competition. Everything's become a competition,
and also quality of aging. Yes, because my darling dad,
who's eighty four and still hanging on after smoking and
drinking himself almost to death when he was in his fifties.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
And a miracle, is still alive. He's very close to
zero quality of life. He's a lovely man.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
We love spending time with him, but he can barely walk.
You know, where's the quality of life? So I've just
written a book about artificial intelligence recently, So I worry
that men take space, that we're getting people to live longer,
but there's no quality of life and also no.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Quality of death. But it's this phenomenon we actually call
in scholarship, we call it prolonged dwindling, which is so
true that it.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Sounds like the worst ever I have never endless.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
But yeah, it's this exactly this thing. Right, So it
used to be if you look at like the kind
of time that used to be, that you'd either have
a sudden illness of a horse through a sword war
back in the day, you and then you would die,
or you would have you know, a serious major illness
like a cancer, or a heart attack and then pretty
soon after you die. Right. What we have now, what
(15:22):
we tend to have now, is these kind of timelines
towards the end of life of you know, multiple hospitalizations
in and out of hospital, or you have something like
Alzheimer's right, where you have a very very very slow
and long cognitive decline potentially with very high care needs.
So you're in hospital. You're in care for twenty thirty years, right,
(15:43):
which is unheard of previously that you would need this level.
So how we die is changing it. It's a completely
different timeline.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Just trace. Let's just return to this moment when you
started to really think about death. You know, you're confronting
your mother's suffering, and you think about, you know, taking control.
All of that about doing something. Was that an impulse?
Was it something that grew over time?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It is knowing my mother's character as being very forthright,
and she was always in control, to speak to control.
She would have liked me to try to control the situation.
It was also obviously that you never want to see
a loved one in suffering. But all of us in
the family a couple of important lessons. Dad's now got
an advanced care directive that's twenty eight pages long.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
What's going to happen?
Speaker 2 (16:27):
My husband and I.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Still haven't done that, but we do talk to our kids,
who are aged eighteen and twenty about this kind of stuff.
I think part of that is my husband's a camera operator.
I've been a long time journalist in newsroom's a very
dark scenes of humor, similar to the crematoriums. So we
talk about death and dying an awful lot at home.
But I think it's important to have those conversations and
to prepare for a good enough death as much as
(16:48):
you can. I mean, what does a good enough death
mean to you?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Thought about that yourself?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, I have. I've had some health issues, how to
cancel last year, and so that sort of thing, you know,
you do start to confront it and think about it.
I'm the fall asleep in the bed, you know, go
to bed one night, don't wake up. That's classic. That's
the classic. Give me the classic. I'm having with the classic.
You know, like what.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Hopefully after you've just finished penning your magnum opus, surrounded
by exactly family.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
You know, for me to be on stage, I've just
finished a searing saxophone. So they not believable. Down you
go something like, I mean, suddurn seems to be just immediate,
immediate and sudden, no suffering.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
People always ask me, you know, do you fear death?
You're afraid of death? Frankly, after studying it for this long, No,
not at all. And I think in an odd way,
there is some kind of a horrific privilege of having
at least one of your parents die young, because all
of a sudden you do start thinking about all those things,
and you learn to live with death, even if you
don't like it a lot of the time. I don't
(17:48):
fear death. I do fear the prolonged dwindling. Yeah, right,
like that, the kind of aging poorly without support in
a way that I can't make the controls and you know,
can't make decisions. That's much more scary than me death.
Death's kind of a great mystery.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Your interaction with your mother Tracy led you to looking
at voluntary sist to die. What did people say about it?
What was it? What was the gen when you first
ot to talk about it, when you first outed a
campaign for all? Well, what wire people say?
Speaker 3 (18:17):
What I noticed was a disconnect that people in the
community overwhelmingly supported this because that scene loved ones dying.
But in our parliaments I saw there are a lot
of people, a higher percentage than the normal population, are
quite religious in our parliaments and unrepresentative unrepresentative and so
a lot of organized religions are pushing back against.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
It, and therefore there.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Wasn't an appetite for change because of that. I think
it took these wonderful lobby groups to get the politicians
to listen and for them to realize that there was
a groundswell of support. And also, of course with the
examples in the Netherlands and Oregon and Canada who have
quite different laws to us, but very successful laws. See people,
I think it's ninety nine point nine percent successful. Only
(19:03):
a tiny amount of people who are abusing the legislation
to tiny, but the rest of it, everyone overwhelmingly aligns
with him. So it's down in a very ethical and
proper kind of one.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
So do you feel as that when he first started
talking about it, really most people were on board. Wasn't
something wasn't one of those things where we're really trying
to we had to convince people.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
No, that's right, except for people who were particularly religious,
because let's face it, everyone, i'm pretty much, unless you're
quite young, has had a loved one die. So this
is something that affected everyone.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, I suppose I was wondering, like someone did some
friend the other day. I have been blah blah blah,
and he went, oh, that weird thing yesterday, like my
ogall died, that's it. And he said, no, no, it
was voluntary. He did the voluntary sister debts. He died
yesterday after two o'clock. You know, Oh, wow, you know
you're there. Yeah, we're all there and it's great, with
a lovely morning with him. We had dinner that before
and then it just thought to place. I said, wow,
(19:55):
how amazing. And what I was really struck by was
what a normal conversation this was. It was a bit
like saying we went to holiday a Queensland, you know,
like it was sort of he wasn't describing some outlandish thing,
you know, it was suddenly this thing, suddenly, voluntariest is
to die was just part of the fabric of our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Do you feel that that's happened in Australia.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I do feel it's become more normalized to your point
over the last twenty years, but there's still a lot
of academic debate about it. At what point should you
be able to do it? At the moment in Australia,
it's overwhelmingly someone with a terminal illness and it's done
by themselves or their doctor, their practitioner. But there are
(20:38):
people who want to bring it in for people who
are elderly and free and don't want to live any
longer to support them. There So we're seeing, I guess,
a fragmentation of the discussion and the arguments, and I'll
be interested to see which way that goes down the track.
It's a lot of debate about people, to your point
earlier with Alzheimer's being able to have dementia.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Sensory pleasures, being able to taste and smell and touch
and hug become really important at the end of life.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Oh, that reminds me of someone I know who did
have a good death, who was my grandfather, Mum's father.
He lived until ninety four and I cared for him
towards the end of his life. Our kids were little then,
were only seven and eight, and he had that burst
and they said, come on in he'll die in the
next couple of days. We brought in oysters, we brought
in red wine. I brought in the kids because I
(21:28):
think it was important for them to see that. And
he had a good death within the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
So it is possible. I think it's rare, but it's possible.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, maybe you know what's happening. A lot of your speciality,
Pannah's in Buddhism and certain Buddism. What are the Buddhists
make of voluntaries is to die well?
Speaker 2 (21:45):
I will say that Buddhism is a religion with over
five hundred million people in it. So it's kind of
like asking what are the Christians right? Right? What are
the Western people think about voluntariesist a dying? So range
of views.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Really, I suppose I was just wondering whether there's anything
in the Buddhist canon as such, or the Buddhist view
that just went no, let life take its course. That's
you know, you must experience suffering, so therefore you must
be experienced.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Adhism right, and suffering well and learning to suffering well
is really important. So there are some Buddhists who would
oppose volunteer SYS to dying because there's a prohibition against killing, right,
But most people in Buddhism will say, way, that prohibition
against killing against kind of the experience of suffering, right,
and lessening people suffering. So certainly there are some Buddhists
(22:30):
who would say, no, you know, we need to experience
suffering and learn how to experience the suffering at the
end of life, and that can be quite instructive. It's
also why some Buddhists may deny pain, medication and even
you know, deny anything that kind of clogs their mind,
because they want to be conscious at the end of life.
They want to experience it all, you know, see where
their consciousness goes to the next reincarnation. But there's also
(22:52):
you know, a massive Buddhist movement that has always kind
of seen humanity on quite a similar level to animals, right,
that we are all beings of this world, and therefore
in the same way that we would you know, have
compassion for the suffering of a pet and you know,
euthanase a pet that's going through on avoidable suffering. There's
many Buddhists who would therefore support the euthanasia of a
(23:16):
human being that's going through suffering right in the same
way because humans are not particularly special, right, We're just
another being in this world, and we want to show
the same compassion for both of those huge range of views.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, Tracy, you said you said you're an atheist. Does
that mean you know, once the final curtain falls, that's it.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well, I'm one of those very open minded atheists. So
if I am diagnosed with something, I fully am open
to the opportunity of religion if I end up needing
it at that time, and I imagine a lot of people,
Oh okay, and if I do decide to do that,
I would choose Buddhism.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
There's actually a fascinating pierce of research that just came
out Professor Manning, religious studies scholar, and she looked at
older atheists and what they think about the end of life.
Because we tend to think, well, religious people have beliefs,
but we don't really study atheists beliefs, right, we just
think they all think nothing. But she actually found that
there was kind of three different kind of worldviews or
narratives that came out that can be summarized as lights out, recycling,
(24:16):
or mystery. Okay, I'm all for I'm all for it.
So the first one is this idea. It's kind of
like death is like anesthesia. You just that's it. In
the end, you know, there's nothing, and it's often very biomedical, right,
It's like sleep, but you don't dream, so it's more
like anesthesia. You know. We will maybe all experience that,
(24:37):
and that's what these people believe, that that will be
the end. The second one is recycling. So this is
the food forms idea. Right, But yes, I will die,
but I may know, Carl Sagan, we're all made of statists, right,
we will go back into the universe and one day
I will be an oak tree or a you know
something quite you know, a beautiful idea. You know, I
(24:58):
subscribe to that.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
I quite like that.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And then and the third one that they're described around
atheists was just mystery that there are a certain group
of people who knows and we can't ask anyone, and
so that it was it was almost kind of curiosity
and excitement towards the end of life. So there are yeah,
you know that, you know, this has quite a great mystery.
It's a great adventure that.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
We're gone fantastic. We didn't talk much about I suppose
the emotion we might feel around death at various points,
you know, like and you know again, I've observers to
lots of conversations on the radio where my parents' generation
stiff upper lip, how's she doing very well, which meant
she wasn't feeling anything at all. There'd been no you know,
(25:39):
like that's sort of how you're meant to feel. We
now tend to be very emotional about death, you know,
like it's like it's part of our funeral rights. I
suppose to release that to make sure we all howl.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, we have this kind of Catharsis model of the funeral, right,
which is this idea that you know, you kind of,
even if you might not want to, you go to
the funeral and you cry it all out with other
people and you have this communal experience of grief, and
somehow that is helpful, if not entirely necessary, for our
long term grief. But you know, there's many cultures around
(26:13):
the world where wailing is a big tradition, right, so
that you know, women physically throwing themselves at the coffin, howling,
collectively crying. You know, it might be an extended period
of wearing a certain color wearing black, you know, gathering together.
Those kind of rituals can also be a way for
people to process grief in emotion. You think of particularly
(26:35):
you know in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, right
that you know, after someone dies, you immediately gather, right,
and there's an extended period of everyone sitting together and
dedicated to experiencing grief together. But quite different to our
kind of one day funeral a week or two after
the person's died and we all go back to our home.
And it kind of depends on what kind of level
(26:57):
of social ties that your cultural society engages in the funeral. Right.
Do you have a very small private funeral where it's
only the immediate family who are the ones that are
supposed to be grieving, or is it everyone you knew
in that society and you have a responsibility to go
and be there because you're part of a much larger
social fabric, right, And that can be quite different. It
can be a three hundred or four hundred person funeral.
(27:19):
You know, one of the largest social groups in Australia
is South Asian Indian Hindu migration. Right, often extremely large
funerals three hundred four hundred people in some cases, right,
because there's a different expectation about who are the mourners,
who is the congregation, who are the people that gather
together and stand against death as it were.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
That's a big difference, seems to me, and I'd love
to hear more about you on this is the cultures
that sit with the body for three days or have
the open coffer viewing of the body, or the body
stays at home. Because my sister and I sat with
Mum's body for as long as we were legally and
practically allowed to in the hospital, which hours and hours
(28:00):
and hours. And when we told a lot of our
Western friends, they said, what an awful thing to do,
But it was really lovely because it cemented that the
idea that she was actually gone. We told her stories,
My sister and I laughed, we cried. It was actually
incredibly therapeutic.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, and this is one of the difficulties is people
feel because they have a lot of people don't have
a lot of information. So if you're lucky, very lucky,
then you will organize maybe one or two funerals during
your whole life, right, and probably they'll be the worse
for your parents, right, and you just don't have a
lot of information because we don't talk about it, so
you don't know what you're allowed to do.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
But you know, in all.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
States and territories across Australia, you are allowed to be
with that body for an extended period of time. You're
allowed to bring that body home. You know, you can
actively resist pressures from the hospital and the hospice and
everyone else to get you out the door. You can
say no, I would like to be with this body
for a bit longer. And as you say, there is
also technologies that can allow you to bring the body
(28:58):
into the home. I mean the reason and we call
them funeral pilans is the front parlor of the house.
That is the room when we used to display the
body and be with the body, and that still occurs
in many cultures around the world. It's difficult, it can
be difficult. It's not always the right decision. You know,
you have to think about your particular circumstances, but it
is possible.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Well, thanks so much. Any final words.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Only that I think we should all choose our own
funerals soundtrack. Lately gone with because well I've gone with
Edith pr No of course, that's a classic. And my
friend is still choosing from five. But I think someone
else gets a choice, they're not choose something terrible.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, yeah, I think that's very important. Get your get
you your funeral, solid sort of dagger catering, whole soundtrack,
the catering you'd be concerned about. You want everyone to
have something any special cheeses or wines, French.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, this is what we did for my dad as well.
It's like red wine, good French trees, bagettes, you know.
You know, if you're gonna agrie, if you're going to cry,
you need some sustenance to support you, not food, comfort
for it exactly, very nice.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Before we let you go your funeral song?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
What do I want people to hear as the coffins
going out or something like that. I don't know if
I've made that choice yet.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Hard rock chairs, No.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
It'd be something. It'll be something chairs, I guess, or
something in that tradition. It's it's probably none, none of
the Frank songs that South a doctor priest. Something huge.
I haven't decided. Yeah, it's it's but you're right, like
everything do it, put some effort into it, you know,
(30:37):
and and have all that stuff ready for for your children.
For those that are going to have to do a
little folder somewhere.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
You could play some of your television clips from over
the years.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I don't think so. I think yours real. Yeah, yeah,
my show really not do that. It's largely children's television.
Trazy don't want to see that. I could conduct it
from I'd like to conduct her from beyond the grave
talkback session, probably in talkback radio or something that that could.
(31:05):
That could be very fun.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
It all call in to your funeral.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Love that it's a similar funeral. It's being broadcast on
the station, and then people can call in with their tributes.
Oh that's good.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Anything it's possible, That is good.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Okay, we've got it. Thank you for helping meself. That's well.
Thanks so much to our guests, doctor Hannah Gould and
Tracy Spicer. You've been listening to season six of Life's
Booming Dying to Know, brought to you by Australian Seniors.
Please leave a review or tell someone about it. If
you want more, head to seniors dot com dot au
(31:43):
slashed podcast May Your Life Be Booming. I'm James All
on Time
Dying is inevitable. It happens to all of us, but
how we acknowledge death and dying is a very personal experience.
With our guests and expert, we'll explore the etiquette, rights
and traditions seen in multicultural Australia and around the world.
Someone who knows about the rights and traditions is doctor
Hannah Gould, an anthropologist working in the areas of death,
(00:27):
religion and material culture. We're also going to be joined
by Tracy Spicer and she's a walk They Award winning author,
journalist and broadcaster, and she's an ambassador for dying with dignity.
Tracy and Hannah welcome, Thanks so much. Hello, Hello, thank
you for coming. Thank you fantastic. Let's talk death.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Why not lots of fun?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You laugh in the face of death.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
What else can you do? I mean, look, you know,
lots of sadness, lots of joy, every single emotion. It's reasonable, surely.
I mean, it's like the question, the ultimate question of
philosophy of history of every one, every response is valid,
not always useful or helpful, but valid. Well, it's a
universal topic of conversation, and that's why I've always loved
(01:10):
dark humor. Because you do have to laugh otherwise what
do you do?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I also think it is the ultimate joke that we
are all going to die, but we live like we're
not going to We live every day as though it's
just not going to happen at all.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Especially in Western society.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I think other cultures have got it right, and we're
in such deep denial about it. It's detrimental to all
of us.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Now this is your area expertise, really is it? Do
other cultures have it right?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Everyone does it differently, right or wrong is kind of
a difficult thing to judge. I think certainly there's a
big thing called like the denial of death thesis right,
and people inspec are a lot of different philosophers and
anthropologists and cultural analysis have looked at Western culture and gone,
oh my gosh, we are so invested in denying death
right and whether that's through denying death by religions that
(02:00):
say you're going to live forever, like, you know, don't worry,
it's not the end, You're off to heaven or whatever
it is, or through you know, great heroic myths. Yes
you'll die, but the nation will remember you forever, so
you know, you won't really die. You'll be a mader
or contemporary. You know, yes, you'll die, but have you
seen how great the shopping is? You know, we can
just ignore, we can deny it and death by being
(02:21):
on Instagram and you know consuming right. So I think
Western culture, in particular, the way we've organized our society
allows us to not think about death.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And we've organized death to be somewhere else, used in there,
to be at the hospital, to be in pallative care, somewhere.
And they may be good, but they're not. They're not
in the cottage, are they. They're not next to it,
not in the bedroom, not in the bedroom.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So we know that say seventy percent of Australians wish
to die at home, only about fifteen percent, and that
is a rate that is lower than all these other
countries we like to compare ourselves. So Australians are more
institutionalized in their death than places like Ireland, like New Zealand,
the United States of America, even Canada. We tend more
than other countries to die in institutions and aged care,
(03:03):
hospitals and hospices.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, the other way in which we deny death is
or the other way in which other cultures have a
different attitude to death, will be that lit'll be to
be more accepting we are all going to die, will
be part of their every day, or they may have
a notion of reincarnation and coming back, which means that
that's a very different attitude to death really than a
heaven and a hell.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, it's not necessarily an end so much. I think
that's kind of quite common in saying, you know, Buddhist
or Hindu or other kind of dharmic religions, particularly Asian religions.
And then obviously there's a lot of Asian religion that's
part of a Sustralian society, so that's also quite present
in Australia. But we can also have a kind of
more secular idea about that. You know, a lot of
is a lot of my mum's generation in particular, have
(03:45):
quite a green, environmental kind of reincarnation model where she
will say, well, I don't particularly believe in heaven, but
I do believe I'm going to become compost food for worms.
You know, I'll come back as a tree or a
flower or a tomato plant, you know, and that's the
that's the kind of reincarnation of like reintegration into the
natural environment, as it were. So there are some kind
(04:06):
of myths or stories we can tell ourselves that perhaps
help us think about death.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, I've got a friend of mine and into our
eighties it said our funeral, just putab me at the
top paddic, let the crows ever go.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
My dad was to be buried in a cardboard box.
Surely that's a wonderful Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, we all say that, don't we. That's a really
common one as well. I hear that a lot of
the radio people will go, mate, just I don't get
put me out with that on the hard rubbish jack
whatever the thing I said, you know, like, do we
really want that?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Do you think? Ah, do we really want that? I
do think Ossie's are pretty pragmatic about death. I do
think we have a certain streak in us that's kind
of like, you know what, it's all a bit much fast,
it's all too much. You can't even get these people
who therefore say, don't have a funeral. You know, I
really don't want to have a funeral. Please don't even
know no fuss. That can be kind of sad sometimes
because I think it's some people kind of not acknowledging
(04:54):
how many people love them and miss them. But maybe
it's also a bit of an Aussie humored humor, that
black humor again, of kind of you know, trying to
laugh in the face of death.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I would agree, But then we all get sucked in
when we're in the funeral home and they show you
the cardboard box and then they show you the glossy
one that's ten or twenty thousand dollars, and you think,
did I really love that person that much?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And should I do it?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So it all feeds into what you were talking about before,
that consumerism and over commercialization.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Well, I also think sometimes I would think it's about weddings,
weddings and funerals. Well, who's it actually for.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Well, it's a punctuation mark, isn't it. I'm a lifelong atheist,
but I do enjoy it. Sounds terrible going to those
kind of ceremonies, whether it's a funeral or a wedding,
because it's important to celebrate and commemorate these changes, these
huge changes.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I love the sharing of stories at a funeral. People
start talking.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Well, you learn so much about someone's life that you
may not have known. And also often they're rich for
that dark humor. I'll never forget my grandmother's funeral, who
I was incredibly closed to, and my father's new girlfriend
loved my grandmother. She was so distraught she tried to
throw herself into the hole in the ground on top
(06:11):
when she was throwing the dirt in, and I thought, well,
that's eat heads, that's good. That's I've never seen that before.
That's a first I've seen that before.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I will say that. You know, when you attend enough
funerals or attend enough cremations for professional reasons as it were,
you kind of see everything, every range of human emotions,
like we kind of think, you know, all funerals are
all happy families, a lot of unhappy families, a lot
of punch ups at funerals, lots of mistresses coming out
of the woodwork at funerals, conversions religious, you know. More
(06:42):
and more people have recorded messages from beyond the graves
that they play at their funeral, or they've decided that
we're having a dance party, or we're having some sort
of festivity or an event. I mean, you can do
anything in stays with it.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Do you go to a lot to just observe?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, I do my research. So I research and death,
and and I work at a crematorium, and I attend funerals,
and I hang around with other people in the death
care sector, and you do see everything.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What do you want to be interested in? You've done this? Well,
why do you want to be around death?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I mean personal and professional professional? I'm an anthropologist, and
anthropologists want to know what brings us together, what makes
us all human? But then also why we do it
so differently? And there is nothing else. It is the question, right,
It is the one thing we all experience, and yet
we've all decided to do it in completely different ways
and completely different ways throughout history. And then personally, my
(07:40):
dad died and I thought, gosh, what on earth is
going on? I suddenly was given the catalog of funeral.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Of coffins, right, and you were young?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I was twenty two, twenty three. My dad died, an
age that was perfectly old and mature at the time,
I thought, but looking back obviously was incredibly young. But yeah,
I suddenly I got handed this catalog of kind of
coffins and they all had these really naf names, like
you know, there's Rich Mahoganies and like it was like
paint colors. Someone had, someone somewhere had decided these were
(08:12):
the options, right that you were, this is what was
going to represent my dad, And I just felt this
massive disconnect and I thought, hang on, I've got to
work out what's going on there. So now I spent
my life in death.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, I suppose most of us think being around death
would be a very gloomy kind of thing to be
the way to spend your day.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It can be very gloomy. But oh my gosh, the
gullos humor that those boys in the crem the crematorium
tell yeah, you know you're joking, tin ooh. Not a
lot of them are safe for work or anywhere.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You were going to jump in our before what are
we going to ask? You know, fellow fellow professional interviewer.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I really see a connection with you being twenty two
when your father died, and I was thirty two when
my mother died. Even at thirty two, I felt like
I was so ready for it, and especially because it
happened so quickly. Mum was the lynchpin for the family.
You know, I was smart and funny, and she could
do anything. She was one of those early superwomen kind
(09:09):
of role models, and then all of a sudden, at
the age of fifty one, she was diagnosed with pancreatic
cancer with seven months to live, and she lived seven months,
almost to the day, and it was blood and guts
and gore. She was an agonizing pain. My sister and
I were injecting her with medication every day. We wanted
her to die in the home, but it got to
(09:30):
the stage we had to bring her to palliative care.
And that's when we started having the conversations about voluntary
a sister dying because Mum and Dad had always said,
put me down like a dog. And again, it's one
of those things that you think it's going to be
easy at the time, but it's not. We talked to
the doctor. The doctor said, I don't want to end
up in jail, and my sister sat there with the
morphine button. She pressed it so off and she had
(09:52):
a bruise on her thumb, and we said, surely you
can just increase the more thing. Because Mum was having
breakthrough pain, so everything was fine until she'd scream once
an hour and there was no way they could cap that.
So it's cruel, right, that's cruel. I don't think there's
any way they would have done it. We tried to
have those conversations, which is why one night, because we
were sleeping in a chair next to her over and
(10:15):
I just hold her hand. When she was in pain,
I picked up the pillow and I did try to
put it over her face because I thought, what kind
of daughter am I to let her suffer? And then
I stopped at the last minute, and then I felt
really ashamed of you know, no, but what a coward
I am, not.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
To say, at the opposite, what an incredibly brave act
to have so much love and compassion for this person
and so much respect what you knew her wishes would
be that you were willing to do that, you know,
not for her, not to her.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
For her that's extraordinary, But she's lovely For you to say,
did she know what you were doing?
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Oh no, She was out of it for about the
previous two weeks, action in and out of it, and
then she died in the next twenty five hours anyway,
so she was very very close, and she'd had that
kind of burst, you know how, They had that almost
done even period a couple of days beforehand. We think
what she seems like she's getting better, and we read
about that final burst. Yeah, is there a name for that?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
You know, I don't know what it's called, but you
know that is when usually the parlative care doctors, the
hospice workers will call up the family and say, guess
what they're up and about. They're talking, they're eating. All
of a sudden, that's genuinely usually a sign that it's
not going to be long.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Wow, isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
It's the final burst of energy. One of the interesting
things about the rise of voluntary assisted dying, of euthanasia,
to speak more broadly in Australia, is it reflects this
kind of cultural shift that we have about the importance
of choice and control towards the end of our life,
and how increasingly like that is becoming an important part
of what we think about as a good death right,
(11:52):
like I want to be able to control where I
die and who I die with than when and the
pain and suffering. Right, And that hasn't always been the case, right,
you know, throughout history, and there's been periods of that.
There's been periods of leave it to God, or there's
also been periods of yes, I must prepare, I have
to like write my final last note or poetry or
whatever it is. But that's increasingly becoming important, particularly for
(12:15):
we see within the baby boomer generation that they really
want to you know, have some sort of choice. And
emphasis on choice.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Well, I mean, I wonder whether a lot of it
is a reaction to the medical control over the end
of our lives is so extreme that we can be
kept alive for so long, and so it's a reaction
to that medical control is to want to say, well,
surely we can have both. Well, you're going to either
keep me alive. If I don't want to be kept alive,
(12:42):
could you let me go?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
It's one of the great paradoxes they've talked about. This
paradox of contemporary death and contemporary medicine is that all
of our interventions have increased, Right, the medicalization of death
has meant that not only have pain control, but we
can keep people alive for longer. You know, we have
better medicines, drugs, palliated. Medicine is massively advanced. And yet
if we ask people, the quality of death and dying
(13:05):
has not increased. And if we look globally, more access
to medicine doesn't necessarily correlate with a higher quality of
death and dying. There's some correlation like do you actually
have the drugs? Can you access them? But when it
gets to kind of over a certain hurdle. Just because
you're dying in Australia versus dying in a country with
no resources doesn't mean you're going to die better.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
What do you what's a quality of death? How are
we measuring that? What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
There's lots of things you can do to measure and
people try so one of them is, you know, to
ask us the family, to ask the dying person, to
also ask the physician, did you think this was a
good death? You know, how do we assess it? Because
it's not just up to the dying person as well,
of course, it's also up to the family, Right, how
did you experience that death? That dying? It's a difficult
(13:52):
thing to measure, right because for some people death is
never going to be you know, the words good death
bad death are kind of controversial now, business like, oh
my god, I have to try and everything else. I
also have to live up to a good death, right,
Like we can't make it good? Can we make it better?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Is a good death? Tracy.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I think this really intersects with competition. Everything's become a competition,
and also quality of aging. Yes, because my darling dad,
who's eighty four and still hanging on after smoking and
drinking himself almost to death when he was in his fifties.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
And a miracle, is still alive. He's very close to
zero quality of life. He's a lovely man.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
We love spending time with him, but he can barely walk.
You know, where's the quality of life? So I've just
written a book about artificial intelligence recently, So I worry
that men take space, that we're getting people to live longer,
but there's no quality of life and also no.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Quality of death. But it's this phenomenon we actually call
in scholarship, we call it prolonged dwindling, which is so
true that it.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Sounds like the worst ever I have never endless.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
But yeah, it's this exactly this thing. Right, So it
used to be if you look at like the kind
of time that used to be, that you'd either have
a sudden illness of a horse through a sword war
back in the day, you and then you would die,
or you would have you know, a serious major illness
like a cancer, or a heart attack and then pretty
soon after you die. Right. What we have now, what
(15:22):
we tend to have now, is these kind of timelines
towards the end of life of you know, multiple hospitalizations
in and out of hospital, or you have something like
Alzheimer's right, where you have a very very very slow
and long cognitive decline potentially with very high care needs.
So you're in hospital. You're in care for twenty thirty years, right,
(15:43):
which is unheard of previously that you would need this level.
So how we die is changing it. It's a completely
different timeline.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Just trace. Let's just return to this moment when you
started to really think about death. You know, you're confronting
your mother's suffering, and you think about, you know, taking control.
All of that about doing something. Was that an impulse?
Was it something that grew over time?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It is knowing my mother's character as being very forthright,
and she was always in control, to speak to control.
She would have liked me to try to control the situation.
It was also obviously that you never want to see
a loved one in suffering. But all of us in
the family a couple of important lessons. Dad's now got
an advanced care directive that's twenty eight pages long.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
What's going to happen?
Speaker 2 (16:27):
My husband and I.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Still haven't done that, but we do talk to our kids,
who are aged eighteen and twenty about this kind of stuff.
I think part of that is my husband's a camera operator.
I've been a long time journalist in newsroom's a very
dark scenes of humor, similar to the crematoriums. So we
talk about death and dying an awful lot at home.
But I think it's important to have those conversations and
to prepare for a good enough death as much as
(16:48):
you can. I mean, what does a good enough death
mean to you?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Thought about that yourself?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, I have. I've had some health issues, how to
cancel last year, and so that sort of thing, you know,
you do start to confront it and think about it.
I'm the fall asleep in the bed, you know, go
to bed one night, don't wake up. That's classic. That's
the classic. Give me the classic. I'm having with the classic.
You know, like what.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Hopefully after you've just finished penning your magnum opus, surrounded
by exactly family.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
You know, for me to be on stage, I've just
finished a searing saxophone. So they not believable. Down you
go something like, I mean, suddurn seems to be just immediate,
immediate and sudden, no suffering.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
People always ask me, you know, do you fear death?
You're afraid of death? Frankly, after studying it for this long, No,
not at all. And I think in an odd way,
there is some kind of a horrific privilege of having
at least one of your parents die young, because all
of a sudden you do start thinking about all those things,
and you learn to live with death, even if you
don't like it a lot of the time. I don't
(17:48):
fear death. I do fear the prolonged dwindling. Yeah, right,
like that, the kind of aging poorly without support in
a way that I can't make the controls and you know,
can't make decisions. That's much more scary than me death.
Death's kind of a great mystery.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Your interaction with your mother Tracy led you to looking
at voluntary sist to die. What did people say about it?
What was it? What was the gen when you first
ot to talk about it, when you first outed a
campaign for all? Well, what wire people say?
Speaker 3 (18:17):
What I noticed was a disconnect that people in the
community overwhelmingly supported this because that scene loved ones dying.
But in our parliaments I saw there are a lot
of people, a higher percentage than the normal population, are
quite religious in our parliaments and unrepresentative unrepresentative and so
a lot of organized religions are pushing back against.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
It, and therefore there.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Wasn't an appetite for change because of that. I think
it took these wonderful lobby groups to get the politicians
to listen and for them to realize that there was
a groundswell of support. And also, of course with the
examples in the Netherlands and Oregon and Canada who have
quite different laws to us, but very successful laws. See people,
I think it's ninety nine point nine percent successful. Only
(19:03):
a tiny amount of people who are abusing the legislation
to tiny, but the rest of it, everyone overwhelmingly aligns
with him. So it's down in a very ethical and
proper kind of one.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
So do you feel as that when he first started
talking about it, really most people were on board. Wasn't
something wasn't one of those things where we're really trying
to we had to convince people.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
No, that's right, except for people who were particularly religious,
because let's face it, everyone, i'm pretty much, unless you're
quite young, has had a loved one die. So this
is something that affected everyone.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, I suppose I was wondering, like someone did some
friend the other day. I have been blah blah blah,
and he went, oh, that weird thing yesterday, like my
ogall died, that's it. And he said, no, no, it
was voluntary. He did the voluntary sister debts. He died
yesterday after two o'clock. You know, Oh, wow, you know
you're there. Yeah, we're all there and it's great, with
a lovely morning with him. We had dinner that before
and then it just thought to place. I said, wow,
(19:55):
how amazing. And what I was really struck by was
what a normal conversation this was. It was a bit
like saying we went to holiday a Queensland, you know,
like it was sort of he wasn't describing some outlandish thing,
you know, it was suddenly this thing, suddenly, voluntariest is
to die was just part of the fabric of our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Do you feel that that's happened in Australia.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I do feel it's become more normalized to your point
over the last twenty years, but there's still a lot
of academic debate about it. At what point should you
be able to do it? At the moment in Australia,
it's overwhelmingly someone with a terminal illness and it's done
by themselves or their doctor, their practitioner. But there are
(20:38):
people who want to bring it in for people who
are elderly and free and don't want to live any
longer to support them. There So we're seeing, I guess,
a fragmentation of the discussion and the arguments, and I'll
be interested to see which way that goes down the track.
It's a lot of debate about people, to your point
earlier with Alzheimer's being able to have dementia.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Sensory pleasures, being able to taste and smell and touch
and hug become really important at the end of life.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Oh, that reminds me of someone I know who did
have a good death, who was my grandfather, Mum's father.
He lived until ninety four and I cared for him
towards the end of his life. Our kids were little then,
were only seven and eight, and he had that burst
and they said, come on in he'll die in the
next couple of days. We brought in oysters, we brought
in red wine. I brought in the kids because I
(21:28):
think it was important for them to see that. And
he had a good death within the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
So it is possible. I think it's rare, but it's possible.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, maybe you know what's happening. A lot of your speciality,
Pannah's in Buddhism and certain Buddism. What are the Buddhists
make of voluntaries is to die well?
Speaker 2 (21:45):
I will say that Buddhism is a religion with over
five hundred million people in it. So it's kind of
like asking what are the Christians right? Right? What are
the Western people think about voluntariesist a dying? So range
of views.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Really, I suppose I was just wondering whether there's anything
in the Buddhist canon as such, or the Buddhist view
that just went no, let life take its course. That's
you know, you must experience suffering, so therefore you must
be experienced.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Adhism right, and suffering well and learning to suffering well
is really important. So there are some Buddhists who would
oppose volunteer SYS to dying because there's a prohibition against killing, right,
But most people in Buddhism will say, way, that prohibition
against killing against kind of the experience of suffering, right,
and lessening people suffering. So certainly there are some Buddhists
(22:30):
who would say, no, you know, we need to experience
suffering and learn how to experience the suffering at the
end of life, and that can be quite instructive. It's
also why some Buddhists may deny pain, medication and even
you know, deny anything that kind of clogs their mind,
because they want to be conscious at the end of life.
They want to experience it all, you know, see where
their consciousness goes to the next reincarnation. But there's also
(22:52):
you know, a massive Buddhist movement that has always kind
of seen humanity on quite a similar level to animals, right,
that we are all beings of this world, and therefore
in the same way that we would you know, have
compassion for the suffering of a pet and you know,
euthanase a pet that's going through on avoidable suffering. There's
many Buddhists who would therefore support the euthanasia of a
(23:16):
human being that's going through suffering right in the same
way because humans are not particularly special, right, We're just
another being in this world, and we want to show
the same compassion for both of those huge range of views.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, Tracy, you said you said you're an atheist. Does
that mean you know, once the final curtain falls, that's it.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well, I'm one of those very open minded atheists. So
if I am diagnosed with something, I fully am open
to the opportunity of religion if I end up needing
it at that time, and I imagine a lot of people,
Oh okay, and if I do decide to do that,
I would choose Buddhism.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
There's actually a fascinating pierce of research that just came
out Professor Manning, religious studies scholar, and she looked at
older atheists and what they think about the end of life.
Because we tend to think, well, religious people have beliefs,
but we don't really study atheists beliefs, right, we just
think they all think nothing. But she actually found that
there was kind of three different kind of worldviews or
narratives that came out that can be summarized as lights out, recycling,
(24:16):
or mystery. Okay, I'm all for I'm all for it.
So the first one is this idea. It's kind of
like death is like anesthesia. You just that's it. In
the end, you know, there's nothing, and it's often very biomedical, right,
It's like sleep, but you don't dream, so it's more
like anesthesia. You know. We will maybe all experience that,
(24:37):
and that's what these people believe, that that will be
the end. The second one is recycling. So this is
the food forms idea. Right, But yes, I will die,
but I may know, Carl Sagan, we're all made of statists, right,
we will go back into the universe and one day
I will be an oak tree or a you know
something quite you know, a beautiful idea. You know, I
(24:58):
subscribe to that.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
I quite like that.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And then and the third one that they're described around
atheists was just mystery that there are a certain group
of people who knows and we can't ask anyone, and
so that it was it was almost kind of curiosity
and excitement towards the end of life. So there are yeah,
you know that, you know, this has quite a great mystery.
It's a great adventure that.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
We're gone fantastic. We didn't talk much about I suppose
the emotion we might feel around death at various points,
you know, like and you know again, I've observers to
lots of conversations on the radio where my parents' generation
stiff upper lip, how's she doing very well, which meant
she wasn't feeling anything at all. There'd been no you know,
(25:39):
like that's sort of how you're meant to feel. We
now tend to be very emotional about death, you know,
like it's like it's part of our funeral rights. I
suppose to release that to make sure we all howl.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, we have this kind of Catharsis model of the funeral, right,
which is this idea that you know, you kind of,
even if you might not want to, you go to
the funeral and you cry it all out with other
people and you have this communal experience of grief, and
somehow that is helpful, if not entirely necessary, for our
long term grief. But you know, there's many cultures around
(26:13):
the world where wailing is a big tradition, right, so
that you know, women physically throwing themselves at the coffin, howling,
collectively crying. You know, it might be an extended period
of wearing a certain color wearing black, you know, gathering together.
Those kind of rituals can also be a way for
people to process grief in emotion. You think of particularly
(26:35):
you know in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, right
that you know, after someone dies, you immediately gather, right,
and there's an extended period of everyone sitting together and
dedicated to experiencing grief together. But quite different to our
kind of one day funeral a week or two after
the person's died and we all go back to our home.
And it kind of depends on what kind of level
(26:57):
of social ties that your cultural society engages in the funeral. Right.
Do you have a very small private funeral where it's
only the immediate family who are the ones that are
supposed to be grieving, or is it everyone you knew
in that society and you have a responsibility to go
and be there because you're part of a much larger
social fabric, right, And that can be quite different. It
can be a three hundred or four hundred person funeral.
(27:19):
You know, one of the largest social groups in Australia
is South Asian Indian Hindu migration. Right, often extremely large
funerals three hundred four hundred people in some cases, right,
because there's a different expectation about who are the mourners,
who is the congregation, who are the people that gather
together and stand against death as it were.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
That's a big difference, seems to me, and I'd love
to hear more about you on this is the cultures
that sit with the body for three days or have
the open coffer viewing of the body, or the body
stays at home. Because my sister and I sat with
Mum's body for as long as we were legally and
practically allowed to in the hospital, which hours and hours
(28:00):
and hours. And when we told a lot of our
Western friends, they said, what an awful thing to do,
But it was really lovely because it cemented that the
idea that she was actually gone. We told her stories,
My sister and I laughed, we cried. It was actually
incredibly therapeutic.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, and this is one of the difficulties is people
feel because they have a lot of people don't have
a lot of information. So if you're lucky, very lucky,
then you will organize maybe one or two funerals during
your whole life, right, and probably they'll be the worse
for your parents, right, and you just don't have a
lot of information because we don't talk about it, so
you don't know what you're allowed to do.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
But you know, in all.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
States and territories across Australia, you are allowed to be
with that body for an extended period of time. You're
allowed to bring that body home. You know, you can
actively resist pressures from the hospital and the hospice and
everyone else to get you out the door. You can
say no, I would like to be with this body
for a bit longer. And as you say, there is
also technologies that can allow you to bring the body
(28:58):
into the home. I mean the reason and we call
them funeral pilans is the front parlor of the house.
That is the room when we used to display the
body and be with the body, and that still occurs
in many cultures around the world. It's difficult, it can
be difficult. It's not always the right decision. You know,
you have to think about your particular circumstances, but it
is possible.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Well, thanks so much. Any final words.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Only that I think we should all choose our own
funerals soundtrack. Lately gone with because well I've gone with
Edith pr No of course, that's a classic. And my
friend is still choosing from five. But I think someone
else gets a choice, they're not choose something terrible.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, yeah, I think that's very important. Get your get
you your funeral, solid sort of dagger catering, whole soundtrack,
the catering you'd be concerned about. You want everyone to
have something any special cheeses or wines, French.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, this is what we did for my dad as well.
It's like red wine, good French trees, bagettes, you know.
You know, if you're gonna agrie, if you're going to cry,
you need some sustenance to support you, not food, comfort
for it exactly, very nice.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Before we let you go your funeral song?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
What do I want people to hear as the coffins
going out or something like that. I don't know if
I've made that choice yet.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Hard rock chairs, No.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
It'd be something. It'll be something chairs, I guess, or
something in that tradition. It's it's probably none, none of
the Frank songs that South a doctor priest. Something huge.
I haven't decided. Yeah, it's it's but you're right, like
everything do it, put some effort into it, you know,
(30:37):
and and have all that stuff ready for for your children.
For those that are going to have to do a
little folder somewhere.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
You could play some of your television clips from over
the years.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I don't think so. I think yours real. Yeah, yeah,
my show really not do that. It's largely children's television.
Trazy don't want to see that. I could conduct it
from I'd like to conduct her from beyond the grave
talkback session, probably in talkback radio or something that that could.
(31:05):
That could be very fun.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
It all call in to your funeral.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Love that it's a similar funeral. It's being broadcast on
the station, and then people can call in with their tributes.
Oh that's good.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Anything it's possible, That is good.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Okay, we've got it. Thank you for helping meself. That's well.
Thanks so much to our guests, doctor Hannah Gould and
Tracy Spicer. You've been listening to season six of Life's
Booming Dying to Know, brought to you by Australian Seniors.
Please leave a review or tell someone about it. If
you want more, head to seniors dot com dot au
(31:43):
slashed podcast May Your Life Be Booming. I'm James All
on Time
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.