Today, the Festival of Debate and Compassionate Sheffield are holding a talk with Dr. Kathryn Mannix called Talking about Dying.
The hour-long talk starts discussions about dying before Dying Matters Week next week.
Dr Kathryn Mannix, 64, a former palliative care doctor and author, retired early to campaign for better public understanding of dying.
As a doctor, she said: “Each new patient I met was just as terrified and as badly informed as they had been when I started.”
About one family she said: “It was a very elderly man. He was going to die in the next few minutes. I asked his children what their dad would want in terms of care, they looked at me completely perplexed.
“One of them said Dad asked me to talk about funeral arrangements and I told him not to be silly. They had stopped their 90-year-old dad from talking about dying because they didn’t want to discuss it.
“I thought we can’t keep doing this. This is not a palliative care problem, this is a societal problem.”
Furthermore, Dr Mannix said: “It’s better for us to discuss how we’d like to live the last part of our lives and to talk to our elders about what they want before they become too sick to decide or communicate what they want.”
As part of Dying Matters Week a performance called Dying Matters takes place at Lab4Living Sheffield.
Ashley Barnes, 56, Sheffield Hallam’s Deputy Head of the Department of Humanities put together the performance in partnership with Dr Michael Tan, associate professor at the University’s Lab4Living.
Mr Barnes worked with his drama students who wrote and performed monologues about their experiences with death; their first performance was before Christmas.
He said: “Theatre has always been obsessed with death since the Greeks, it’s at the heart of many of Shakespeare’s plays.
“Actors use language like corpsing or dying on stage, if someone forgets their lines or laughs.
“If we think about television and film and all the different film media, that isn’t live is it? It’s something about it happening there in front of you that shared experience with an audience and a performer.”
“I think that there’s some potential in this where we utilise the process of telling our stories as a means of other people telling theirs.”
Dr Tan said: “The work for me is motivated by the potential regret, should haves, could haves that one may feel in the event of a death particularly someone close to us.
He said they see the performance as a co-learning space where an experience of loss can help others.
“It encourages us to be aware of the invisible struggle and to be kind and compassionate.”