What Happens When We Talk About Death More Openly?

I have known Dr Kerrie Noonan for many years and was pleased she was able to make time to speak with the podcast, The Listening Project for our upcoming series on grief and loss.

Kerrie has spent more than three decades working across palliative care, bereavement, research and community life.

We spoke at length about what would change if we were better equipped to face death — not as a medical event, but as part of being human?

Modern life has become strangely uncomfortable with death, despite the fact it is one of the few experiences every one of us will eventually encounter. We speak about it in hospitals, in legal documents and in moments of crisis, but rarely as part of ordinary life.

Many people reach the end of someone’s life without ever having had open conversations about dying, grief, caregiving or what matters most when time becomes short.

Kerrie’s work in death literacy asks something deceptively simple: what do we know about death, dying and loss — and how do we apply that understanding in our own lives and communities when grief and loss arrive?

During our conversation we spoke about communities, about care, and about the ways people learn to hold one another at the edge of life. We spoke about the growing movement toward compassionate communities and the recognition that care cannot sit entirely inside hospitals and health systems.

People want to be known. They want a say in how they die, if they are able to be so fortunate. They want connection. And often, wherever possible, they want to die at home.

Kerrie spoke movingly about her own mother’s death — what her family prepared for, what they thought they understood, and the realities they still confronted despite her decades of professional experience in end of life literacy.

One of the things this conversation revealed is that knowledge does not remove grief. Experience does not protect people from loss. Even those who work in this space every day still walk through the same uncertainty, heartbreak and exhaustion as everyone else.

And perhaps that is part of what death literacy is really about.

Not mastering death. Not removing fear. But becoming more capable of being present with it and recognising the sacred space that it is.

Australia is slowly beginning to talk more openly about ageing, end-of-life care, grief and the rise of community-based support, including end-of-life doulas and compassionate community models. But culturally, many people still feel unsure how to speak about death until they are forced into it by circumstance.

What Kerrie asks is whether we can begin those conversations earlier. Around kitchen tables. Inside workplaces. Across communities.Inside families.

Not because death is dark, but because avoiding the conversation often leaves people more frightened and isolated when loss finally arrives.

At GIDII Advocacy, these conversations matter because they sit within the broader question of human dignity — how we care for one another inside the most vulnerable moments of life.

And as with all of these conversations, what stayed with me was not simply what was said. It was what it revealed about how we live when we show we care about each other.