Breaking The Taboo Against Talking About Death / KUOW

How do you want to die? Seattle food provocateur and entrepreneur Michael Hebb wants you to talk about it — over dinner.

Hebb says how we want to die represents the most important and costly conversation Americans aren’t having. The price of end-of-life care can bankrupt a family and often doesn’t improve quality life for the one dying. And it’s much more difficult to navigate end-of-life decisions, and how an individual wants to be remembered, when the conversation never happened.

The “Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death” project, a division of Engage With Grace, brings the subject of end-of-life into the foreground and gives people the opportunity to talk about it.

“Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death” stemmed from a digital media communications course taught with project co-designer Scott Macklin at the University of Washington last fall. The course and resulting long-term project is intended to create communal dialogues around death, health care and human life, and to foster proactive conversations about end-of-life decisions.

ResourcesPlan your own death dinner and add to the project Course syllabus on Learnist

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May 7th, 2013