A New Movement Helps Push Open the Conversation on Death

Credit: Let’s have Dinner and Talk About Death

Michael Hebb, of the University of Washington, has a passion for getting the conversation going on death. He was on a train from Portland to Seattle and happened to sit in the diner car with two doctors — all were complete strangers. During the course of a casual conversation, he found out some shocking statistics; 62% of bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical expenses and a leading factor is end of life. He also discovered that 75% of people want to die at home, yet only 25% do.

In the past, Michael had had many large dinner parties with the intent of creating social changes for a pleathora of topics — he believes that “deep engagement and profound relationships create volocity.” So, as he ended his train excursion, he knew that the topic of end of life was his next mission. He returned to the University of Washington and announced that he wanted to “start a large scale intervention” and thus, Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death was born. Through his work, Michael has created a movement to encourage people to sit at the dinner table together and have an end of life conversation.

“My work is to bring people together, to break bread and spark social change”

A sample of the site that creates a program to help start the dinner conversation

Now, we are celebrating the launch of the site, which will function as a tool for a host and his/her guests in kick-starting the conversation on death. Michael believes that how we die is, truthfully, the most important conversation we are not having. Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death uses the dinner table as a great magnet for this conversation — it draws people together and sends them back out into the world with new insights on the end of life topic.

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