Describing a good death

At our Dying Well community forum we asked everyone – attendees and panel members – to describe a good death in 3 words.

Responses were written on post-it notes and displayed on boards – some of which you can see below. And they were really interesting – showing both the commonality in our thinking as well as our differences.  Three themes emerged from all those colourful post-its:

1. Choice and control – Many people talked about my choice, my way, my options, having control over decisions.
2. Peace, lack of pain and feeling safe.
3. People, love and being surrounded.

One of the answers really stood out as meaningful in the context of our current consumer awareness campaign on Advance Care Planning called You only die once. And that was “I am ready”. We couldn’t agree more!

We were extremely fortunate to have a world renown panel who were in Perth for the Oceanic Palliative Care Conference, as well as the always wonderful Di Darmody leading the discussion. Thank you to Dr Christian Ntizimira from Rwanda, Greg Adams from the USA and Distinguished Professor Patsy Yates from Queensland. Feedback on the panel and the discussion was excellent with the audience valuing hearing about international perspectives on palliative care and dying well.

Thank you also to Marie Taylor who provided the really beautiful Welcome to Country as well as some cultural perspectives on dying.

We are extremely grateful to our benefactor who allowed us to be able to offer Dying Well as a free event.