This event is kindly sponsored by Marie Curie.
Our original ‘Reflections on Death and Dying’ event was a very memorable highlight of our first Good Grief Festival. It garnered such wonderful feedback that we are thrilled to welcome back our original panellists to explore a new topic: how we can find hope, even in these darkest hours.
Our guests include oncologist, Sam Guglani, and palliative care doctors, Kathryn Mannix and Rachel Clarke.
Questions we’ll bring to the table include how can hope and grief be reconciled; how do we balance the optimism of the Covid-19 vaccine, with grieving for those who have died; and is it too soon or disrespectful to start talking about hope?
Sam is a novelist, poet and Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham. He has Masters degrees in Ethics (Keele, 2009) and Creative Writing (Oxford, 2014). He is the director of Medicine Unboxed, a project dedicated to illuminating the challenges and wonders of medicine through the arts. His debut novel, Histories, was published in 2017.
Kathryn is a Palliative Care Consultant and author who wants to break the taboos surrounding death. Her book, With the End in Mind (2019), explores the process of dying and how to live well and experience ‘a good death’. Here are the five key things that Kathryn has observed at death beds throughout her career.
Rachel is a physician specialising in palliative care for the NHS. She’s also an activist and the author of Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss (2020). Her new book, Breathtaking, describes her experiences of caring for the most gravely unwell patients on the Covid-19 wards of her hospital. Rachel retrained as a doctor in 2009 after a career in journalism, and firmly believes there is a good way to approach end-of-life care.
