Kathryn Mannix

They're great resources.

There's the wonderful palliative doctor, Catherine Mannix, who talks about the last stages of life and what dying looks like, what stages a death has.

So it is, don't be scared to be curious, actually.

Allow yourself to be curious because all the resources are increasingly out there.

I don't know if you've come across her.

There's a British woman called Catherine Mannix.

She's a doctor.

And she wrote a couple of books.

And Wendy was saying that she felt, she used the word uncomfortable, comfortable conversation as opposed to a difficult conversation.

There is, Catherine Mannix uses the term now, tender conversations.

You've got these different adjectives in terms of descriptors.

And it really goes from one end of the continuum to the other, you know, where I've knocked on a door to see a patient and when it's opened the door, I started to say who I am.

And whatever word we use, I often use the word important conversations.

We can't pretend they're easy or they're everyday conversations.

But, you know, whatever, whether they attend to conversations with Catherine Mannix, whether they're important, you know, we do need to get out of that mindset of calling them.

And because, as you say, they're not always difficult, even sometimes they're not even difficult.

The medieval church had a whole tradition called the Asmere and Dei, the art of dying well, which taught Christians to prepare for death with prayer and confession and conversations with the people that they loved.

The British palliative care doctor Catherine Mannix, in her book With the End in Mind, argues from decades at the bedside that families cope far better when people have talked openly about dying before it happens.

So write down what you'd like at your funeral.

Choose the scripture readings and the resurrection hymns and tell the people you love.

With your parent,

which comes back to all the work that Catherine Mannix has done with us about the ability and the willingness to open up some of those conversations that don't have to be too scary to start with.

It can just be...

Mum, what does a good day look like for you? And then you can unpack a lot of other things behind it.