Dying to Know Day 2021
The Groundswell Project is an Australian not-for-profit that’s socialised conversations around end of life for over a decade, and our ‘Dying to Know Day’ campaign encourages people to come together during August every year. Daniel Woods Funeral Care engages with the Groundswell Project each year and helps promote talking about death and attempt to remove the stigma around death and dying.
Why ? Quite simply, we understand this is a tough conversation to have. Dealing with a life limiting diagnosis and death is traumatic enough, but if we don’t connect through one of humanity’s only shared experiences, the emotional trauma can last years, and even through generations.
The aim is to motivate everyday people, healthcare organisations & employers to create space for these conversations to happen. We provide supporting resources and workshops to guide the discussion, and a toolkit to help promote your gathering or event.
If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that we all need connection. So this year’s Dying to Know Day is all about talking, connecting, and giving people courage to broach the subject of end of life and death, because the rewards are nothing short of life changing.
Preparing an end-of-life plan, for example, helps those you leave behind honour your final wishes. A plan, in many ways like a birth plan, lays out your choices based on your values, ensuring you depart this world on your own terms.
And the very act of sharing hopes & fears before we are in that emotional moment, can create connections that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. The sharing of lived stories, long forgotten dreams & regrets, even passing on the knowledge of what matters most, in the final moments of our lives.
All of this lost, if we don’t start the conversation when we’re well.
Some compelling statistics:
● Over 70% of Australians want to die at home, but only 14% actually do. Why? It takes planning and people to help to die at home.
● 75% of people have not discussed end of life with their families
● 45% of Australians die without even having a will in place!
● 92% of deaths are expected. Yet despite the knowledge of what’s coming, only 28% have actually had this most important conversation with loved ones
So let’s act together, and make space for death like we used to. If you’d like to help us shift that 28%, please share our story. And if you do so, we’ll be eternally grateful.
