On Death with Paul Bennet

And there was a TV show called Blue Peter , which the British viewers may or may not know , and there was a contest , art contest , and this year the contest was to draw a Yeti , and so I didn't draw a Yeti , I designed Yeti World and I designed the house in which the Yeti lived and the Yeti's family and the Yeti system and the Yeti's car and the Yeti ,

this and the Yeti , that , and the Himalayas and the whole nine yards and I won a Blue Peter badge . And so I guess I went from being weird art kid to being possibly artistic . But I worked my way through the design profession .

I worked in design , I worked in advertising and eventually , sort of after many years , started my own business , moved to New York , started my own business , which was then a branding agency when , I think , I first took the fact that I was doing this seriously and it took me seriously that was in the mid to early 90s .

And then I went to San Francisco and found a company there called IDEO , who are still in business , big Silicon Valley design company , where I worked for 23 years and worked my way through everything from product to service , to experience , to healthcare , to government , and I guess the theme would be at increasing scale , with increasing impact and an increasing desire

to do things that mattered . I am increasingly less interested as I've gotten older I'm 62 now and as I've gotten older , I've got increasingly less interested in creating ephemeral things and increasingly more interested in creating meaningful things which will lead us into the conversation , hopefully , that we're about to have . Yes , I think so .

Correct , no , no sure .

Yeah , a friend of mine once described design as like going into a cave with a torch and looking to see where the walls were , and I love the idea of sort of shining a shining a torch inside of a dark space and looking where the shine , where the walls glistened right . So a large part of it .

And she described this as going into the void , and I always like that phrase of going into the void , going into the space . That is difficult , the void . So part of me , yes , was wired to look for the void . Part of me was looking for challenges which I had not seen .

I'd also been on a journey of having gone to places of the world where I'd been confronted with shocking things , with poverty , with despair . I told the story when I was there of going into Congo and seeing things there , of seeing in India , of seeing things that I never thought that I would see .

So part of me was curious about what I could bring to the darker spaces . But then my dad died , and my dad didn't just die . The person who gave me everything died , and my father gave me my creative start in life . My father was the person who most believed in me . My father was the person who put me on this path .

Father was the person who put me on this path . So , yes , my parent died , but the metaphor was much deeper than that for me . My pilot died , and he didn't just die . He didn't just die like keel over , have a heart attack and died .

He died in the way that you don't want to die and then the way that he talked about for years please don't let me die like that . You know he used to make jokes if I can't wipe my ass , get me out of here . And then he couldn't . And if I can't do this , don't let me . If I can't , if you're spoon feeding me , oh my god . And then we were .

So you know what started one day as my dad , falling off a ladder , turned out to be spinal cancer , turned out to be my father wired into a wall for the next year , and the last part of that was a horrifying process .

And I was abroad , and so I was trying so hard to try and get somebody to just tell me the truth , and that sounds like such a loaded statement . Tell me the truth . That's one of the hardest things to get out of the system . Just tell me the truth . Is he going to ? Where is he on this ? Will this happen ? Everybody would sort of dance around with that .

So it wasn't just my dad died , it was my dad died in the way that I would never have wanted my father to die . The last interaction I had with him , I was in LA and I called him . I remember it as if it was yesterday . I called him and he he picked up . They put him through to his hospital board and I said how are you ?

And he said , as British military guys do , the most understated way possible . He said I'm not so good , son , and I said I'm , I'm coming home . And he said and these words to this day chill me to the bone he said I don't want you to come , I don't need you to see me like this .

And it was that , those words , that were the last things he said to me . He died the next day . Many ways , that was the brief , that was the thing that catalyzed me . He died the next day . Many ways .

That was the brief , that was the thing that catalyzed , that was the creative brief , that was the liberation , in many ways , of seeing what I had , what I didn't want to see but had to see . And in many ways it was the thing that then catalyzed me into excuse me , I'm joking , I've been speaking it but it was the thing that catalyzed me into this .

I'm going to go into the cave with the torch immediately and I'm going to start looking around here because I cannot not honor him and this by just allowing this moment to pass . So that's what led me into that

journey . You're welcome , everybody , everybody is what you see in the cave . You just said it , you just answered the question . You see everybody , everybody's in there , everybody's got a story . So so I , I went out , sort of publicly , as I often did , and said death , what the fuck somebody should redesign death .

And I woke up the next morning with my inbox just bursting , bursting and it and it was bursting with three , with actually what I would describe as three needs , three insights . The biggest one was the first one , which was just everybody's desire to tell you their story , to not have their story go into the void , but for their story to be recognized .

My brother committed suicide , my father did this , my mother did this , this happened to me , this happened to someone else . Let me tell you my story , even if you didn't reply , which , obviously I wasn't able to saying it out loud , was an act of catharsis . So that was one thing .

That the cave illuminated was just everyone has a story , everybody has a story , even if it's a pet dying . It doesn't matter who it is . Everyone's experienced , everyone has touched this in some way , shape or form . The second bucket was nobody knew what the fuck to do about it . Everybody said the system's broken .

And then you would go well , what's part of the system ? And they go , I don't know . But the system ? Well , can you talk about the system . I don't know , it's just the system , it's just a system . It's just goes on forever and no one could identify where the breaking points were , other than it was broken . But nobody could tell you what it was .

Just somewhere between health insurance and end of life directive , and nurses doing things to you that you didn't want to do and your dad begging to die , and somebody asking , as I did , is he going to die ? And somebody saying I can't tell you that , all of these kind of broken membranes , if you like . That was the second bucket .

It was sheer frustration that there was so little linearity in a complex world .

Right , the third bucket , which was actually the most interesting but the smallest , was everybody had a million ideas for how it could be better and as a boomer , I think we've seen so much change in our lifetime , We've seen so many other things get eradicated , and yet death is Victorian , right , death is this weird Victorian cover up the piano legs and shut the

curtains , kind of thing . And yet everybody wanted there to be a different death . The number of times somebody said to me I don't want to die like my dad , I don't want to die like my grandparents , I don't want to die like X , y , z .

And what about if we did a million things and they went from the most absurd hippie burial under a sequoia tree , awesome things , all the way through to , I mean , one company I actually became quite obsessed with , who were a Dutch company , who were able to turn cremation ashes into jewels , into diamonds , which was just magnificent , right .

So it went from a desperate desire to speak , a desperate frustration at the inability to navigate , to a desperate desire to see change happen . And those three things were what came at me on day one and have never stopped coming at me .

Frankly , I mean , I've had people come , people still say the death guy , and I'm like , oh god , well , you know , not really , but you know I looked at it . Well , what's what's going on ? And so there's glimmers of things .

But one of my learnings sorry , I know I'm taking up a lot of air here today , but one of my learnings over now , doing this for quite some time , is time is a design

tool . I mean , we've been dealing with death in the same way for thousands and thousands of years . So to just say , overnight I'm going to have a brainstorm and hey , death , we're going to redesign you in 48 hours with an app . Put my own naivety into that .

It's a naive act to assume Death is a long cultural arc which takes many , many years , many generations , for people to change . I will say , though , that there are now more of us that are going it can't be like this than ever before , and that's the thing that I'm taking the most heart from at this point . Mm-hmm , sure you . The answer is yes .

There's no one answer . There is no one answer to death . There is . It's not digital or analog , it's both . It depends on how you treat it . There is no memorial , no memorial headstone , no headstone . Do you do a playlist ? Do you plan your funeral ? I've been to , I've been to one of it , every single one of those .

What there needs to be is choice , and that's the . That's the thing , and you need to . You need to get into that choice mode much earlier than you are ready to . One of the things that was very obvious to us was death was a surprise to everybody who was dying . Everyone was like like holy shit , I'm dying , fuck . Now , what do I do ? Including myself .

I told Natasha right , a heart attack . I'm lying and staring up at the roof going oh fuck , I haven't made an end of life directive . Do I do it now , before I die ? I mean , what do I do ? I'm about to die , aren't I ?

So one of the things again , I'm going to use this phrase several times time is of the essence and one of the insights that we found very , very early and which , I have to say , I think I hold on to as a very interesting thought who you are able to speak about death with is quite interesting , right ?

The fact that the three of us can have this conversation about death and it not be weird is actually not space that you can actually start to have a conversation with much early on , with you can actually say if it was me , I'd want this . Can you please do this for me ? If it was me , I'd need x . Can you please take care of that for me ?

So the idea of who you talk about death with and with whom is is an opportunity , is a design opportunity . At At the moment , it tends to be too late in crisis and rushed . I mean , if I can tell a very personal story , buying my father's headstone was possibly the lowest point of his death , because he'd already died . My mother was distraught .

We're at some shitty local funeral home and this dude is trying to upsell my mother on a piece of stone and saying , well , he would have wanted the best and I'm like he would have wanted none of this . So that is , to me , that's the opposite of what , what it should be . Now , how you bring it in to the .

And again , the word that I will use many times is how do you normalize this to the point where you get to it much earlier , much more normally , in a much more sort of fluid way , so that you feel like you're in control , rather than it's too late . I'm in , I'm stroking out , I'm in a hospital bed staring at the roof .

Do I have to choose my headstone now , or do I have to tell the person next to me Go ahead . Yeah , yeah , yes , you don't die twice . You die once , and there's nothing worse than dying twice . Everybody said I don't want to die twice .

Well , exactly , I mean , I spoke at the American Association of Palliative Care Physicians and somebody said to me what has death taught you ? And I said it has taught me to resolutely live , and I think that is the example here . I think you can resolutely live and reconcile the fact that you're going to die at the same time .

I don't think those two things are different . And so once you have your , it sounds so 1930s sort of great . Once you have your affairs in order , actually it's just one less thing to worry about . And there are ways and means .

I mean , I live in Denmark where all of that stuff is done digitally and it's all on your health record and it's all plugged in and basically you never have to think about it again . You don't have to go through some weird , like you know , sitting in some dusty office and writing down , do not resuscitate , and all that stuff . It's all done for you .

And then there are the other bits on top . Again , one of the big learnings that we found is once they actually once you open that barrier , once people have the floodgate is slightly open and you start saying things like well , what music would you like played at your funeral ? And people are like oh my god , I want the bassist , you roll us .

Oh my god , I want , I want xyz played . Oh my god , I want it . I want this to be played . And I want I don't want to be with some weird , horrible coffin covered in lilies . I would love it to be , you know , a light room . And there is a way to add some and again .

These words are very loaded and I'm aware of my saying that there's a way to add some poetry to it whilst you're still alive . That doesn't subtract from it and doesn't subtract from your life . It's just yet another thing that you don't want to burden everybody else with once you've gone .

So many people , when asked , one of their greatest wishes is to die well , and die well means not die wired into a wall in a hospital and be remembered when you have gone well .

And it is that latter piece that I think is very , very important to not forget as well is that you are remembered and the last memory that people have of you is positive , and if you can help create that , that's a good thing . I think in many cases I'm sorry , all

right , sure , and it . And the answer is again yes , everybody goes up and down the spectrum here . You know , I've I've been in rooms with people going don't let me die . Five minutes later going let me die , right , I mean , and that is just the reality of it . We , the body clings right , um , and there is no one answer .

You know , there is no one answer . All you can try to do wherever you can is is a maintain the center and be as much as you can and it sounds as if you did , which I'm very happy to hear Be with that person as much as you possibly can , in whatever moment they are .

I always say to people I get asked a lot my parents dying , they've got six months . What's your advice ? I always say the same thing Enjoy , enjoy it , enjoy this moment , enjoy whatever moments you can find of enjoyment in it .

Not everything is going to be a total bummer , not everything is going to be total euphoria , but try to find whatever you can in the center of all of that . One answer to is there a right or a wrong ? But ultimately , at the end of the day , when that person is ready and if they are ready , then it is your job to support them .

No , no , no , now that's the word , that's the word . Thank you . Hmm , I mean yes and no . There are circumstances where it is good to be ready and there are circumstances in which it is just not . You can overdwell on things and be like , oh my God , is it coming today ? Is it coming today ? Is it coming today ? I'm not living my life .

I'm not living my life . I mean , I've been around those people who've had metastatic diagnosis and they're just sitting waiting to die as opposed to continuing to live . I've been around those people and there are other people who are like fuck it , I'm ready , here's the playlist , let's go Right .

So I think it depends on on who you are and where you are and who you're with , but there is no one answer . But I will say one thing you are not playing God by acknowledging death . You are playing being a human being at its highest form by acknowledging death . You're not trying to cheat death . No one pretends they're not going to die . It's just when .

It's just when . So you can stave it off as much as you can and you can try to be as honest about where you are in the process as you can . But ultimately , as I said to you , natasha , 100 market opportunity here . 100 of us go into the 100 of us . This is going to happen too . So yeah , I know what you're going to ask Go ahead .

Yeah , exactly , well , so again , he's in my bucket . He's in my third bucket , right in the bucket of extreme users who are trying radical experiments to see which ones stick . Right now there's a lot to be said for , you know , living healthily . After my I had a heart attack a couple of years ago . I have radically . I take 41 vitamins a day too .

So I have radically rethought my own health as a response to that . Now I'm not swapping blood with people but at the same time I I understand the desire to live as long as possible , as healthy as possible . It's the old confusion , quote you have two lives . The second one begins when you realize you only have one right now . It's true .

It's also one of the few that's actually true , and once you have that realization , you do change things in order to be able to hold on . But to natasha's point , silicon valley . There's a whole bunch of crazies there as well , doing all kinds of crazy shit , doing all kinds of stuff .

That is , I would say , not in the interests of kind of learning for all , but in the kind of vanguard for oneself kind of stuff , right , and I'm not a fan of that , although I am very , very interested in , you know , some of the early stages . There's really interesting stem cell research going on .

Psilocybin we talked about , you know , sort of the ability to expand consciousness is a very interesting tool when applied to some of this stuff . So I would say there's always something to be learned from the fringe . You just can't exist totally on the fringe . You have to bring the fringe wherever you can into the mainstream .

But also there's money to be made here as well , and people are trying to figure out how to commercialize this , and you know , okay , so be it . You know , I personally don't want to spend all my money staying alive for an extra 10 years . I'd rather have 10 great years and the money to spend .

But there are a lot of people out there who are trying to do those things . Brian , I suspect , is one of them , although I have to say credit to him . He's putting all his stuff out transparently . He's doing it in a very , very sort of open and honest way . He's got some degree of humor about it .

So I actually think he's a pretty good role model for what should be happening . So I actually think he's a pretty good role model for what should be happening . But there are a bunch of people swirling around this trying to figure out what's the business opportunity , and not surprisingly cool , I guess . I mean , I'm I'm not .

I'm not a huge fan of um replicating yourself and all of the you know all the stuff that goes around it I mean again , I think , in the idea of research , hugely interesting . There's a lot of stuff that's going on around again , around stem cells and interesting sort of biological stuff that I think is very powerful .

I will tell you one thing which rose to the surface when we first started talking about death , which was I don't want to just end up as some bot somewhere .

I don't want to end up with some digital facsimile of myself sitting at a dinner table , digital facsimile of myself sitting at a dinner table , you know so there was a huge degree of desire to be remembered , to be remembered in a very real way .

I mean , of all of the things that we designed , the thing that people wanted the most was a scrapbook , a scrapbook with pictures in it that they could actually touch .

So in all of this digital kind of , you know , digital world , the analog , the remembered , the human , the tactile , the sensorial , the touch , the remembered , the felt , were very , very , very important to people , much more so than the kind of digital proxy of myself . Important to people , much more so than the kind of digital proxy of myself .

Now , you may be right , yeah , yeah , yeah , may be right , yeah , yeah , yeah , and you and you may be right . I mean , we were certainly not talking to teenagers at the time about about the of life .

I mean , obviously we well , we'd had quite a lot of conversations about suicide and about stuff that revolved around suicidal tendencies , but we definitely were not talking to kids about dying .

So you may or may not be right , and I would posit you're probably right there that today's generation is much more comfortable with being in digital memory as opposed to in analog memory . Certainly , my generation at the time , and my generation and younger , were very , very much more interested in being remembered as a person as opposed to as a digital presence .

There was a lot of conversation at the time about how you died twice . You died once and then you died digitally , and I remember thinking that was a very interesting way to frame that up .

So you may be right that now , as we get more and more comfortable with multiple versions of ourselves existing , many of which are not even real anyway , the idea that there's a sort of avatar , me somewhere , somewhere else may or may not be something that becomes of interest . Right , all right , thank you , which I love .

I love that story that gives me tremendous hope that finding his dad .

I mean , you're right , unbelievable . Your son went into the cave with a torch and he found his dad . He found his dad and I mean that's gives me tremendous hope for this generation . That that's the application of it is not to try and live forever , but to try and actually find ways to reconnect with the .

You know , I I told you this phrase in Eon this folds of time , this idea that time is folded and we meet multiple versions of ourself as we go through space and time . He was finding a fold of time and space in which he was able to talk to his father in the cave . It's wonderful . So I love that story .

I mean , and that gives me tremendous hope , that this generation is going to start to think about those kinds of tools and those kinds of experiences , as opposed to robots , which just seems kind of lazy , but to find to actually be brave enough to go into the cave and ask your father what did it feel like to die ? All right , thank you .

This conversation is making me very , very happy . I love the idea of all of these sort of layers of time and space all kind of weaving themselves back together again . Great minds from the past and kids today can have conversations . It's very enlivening to hear things like this happening . No , mm-hmm . So I want to push back on a couple of those things .

First , natasha , I don't think we can redesign death , but we can certainly redesign some of the rituals around death . I mean , when I was a kid , we lived in Singapore and one of my earliest memories was there being a parade at the end of our street and I went down and everyone was gongs and banging and it was .

Everybody was in red and dancing and it was a funeral and I remember thinking good God , this is amazing , right ? Or in Vietnam , they put fireworks in the coffin so that people you know go off in these amazing trails of light .

So you know , zen Hospice , one of the places where I was part of in California , have this beautiful ritual when somebody dies and everybody's terrified of touching a dead body , for somebody dies and everybody's terrified of touching a dead body . For some reason , everybody's terrified of touching a dead person , like they're going to catch it from them .

They have this ritual where everybody they put the body out in the courtyard when they've died and everybody plucks a flower from the garden and lays it on the body and then they seal up the body covered in flowers . So I think there's space to do things like that , to add new dimensions to rituals , if you like . I think that's one thing .

Zen Hospice Project . Zen Hospice Project and BJ Miller is the palliative care physician , but they have all kinds of . Again , I told you they bake cookies there . I mean , half the people who are there are not eating , but the smell of cookies makes them feel alive . I guess it's just such a lovely thing to do , you know , to make to remember .

He said a line which I really love why does death have to be so anesthetic ? Why can't it be aesthetic ? And I love that notion of death doesn't have to be anesthetic , it can be aesthetic . So okay , so let's talk about euthanasia .

I mean , I sent you both a piece that was from a colleague of mine who I'd worked with , who actually did assisted suicide with her mother and she did a TED Talk about it , and she sort of talks very openly about the daughter's journey of going through that of her mother's wishes , what it felt like .

You know the sort of journey , and was she ready and was she not ready ? And at the end of the day , you know , I think she fulfilled her mother's wish for her . So again , the answer is there's no one way , there's no one answer here . Some people , you know , want to control For me here . Some people you know want to control for me .

If it was me I've thought about this a lot I'd be out in a heartbeat if I got had a stroke or if I had some kind of metastatic stage four thing done . You know , I would be , I would want to be out of here as quickly as possible , as cleanly as possible . But for other people that's that's . It's not as easy as that .

You know , everybody goes up and down the spectrum with that , with their own wishes , with fear , and fear comes in and fear comes in and out .

But I do say I think that assisted death , assisted dying , is not going away as an idea and and is becoming now something that a lot more people are actually demanding and a lot more countries are considering and a lot more places are starting to look at . So I think it's I do Right . Thank you Did that , did the ?

I mean , I'm going to ask you a very direct question Did the chaos surrounding it make it easier ? Because it was out of your control ? That's why Thank you so well . Back back to my original statement a while back .

Once you have all those things in place and you know if it's pine or cedar , it allows you to focus on something else , which is the death itself , because you can distract yourself with a million reads and playlists , but actually you're distracting yourself from the person who really needs your focus .

So had I have had the ability to fly home and given my father assisted suicide , I would have done it in a heartbeat , and in fact it's . My biggest regret is that I wasn't able to do that for him . So because I don't , I wish I could have spared him

what he had to go through in his last few days . But I hear you and again , thank you for your candor . It's very important that we share these kinds of feelings , because this is a very gnarly topic and everybody gets very het up about it . I mean , for everybody that agrees with everything we've just said . There'll be people going . Who are these people ?

To play God ? We can have this conversation . You don't get this . You don't get the right to do this . You do get the right to do this . So it's important to have a conversation about it and bring it out to the light .

I think , tiz , if you watch extremists , the documentary extremists , which I've sent you a link to , that entire show is essentially patients begging doctors to not let their loved ones die . Try one more thing , do one more thing . Do one more thing . Do one more thing , do one more .

Whatever Some Hail Mary might happen , and in 99% of the cases it doesn't , of course . So I find this , again , this is a very conflict . Everybody has different opinions . For me , it should be about the person who's dying and their goodwill and their sense of being of leaving .

For me , my father's dignity was left behind and he did not get to take that with him . I got , I robbed him of that in a way . I did not allow him to have that . He was not allowed to take that with him , which is what he wanted more than anything else .

So , but you're right , natasha , I mean , you know everybody has very different perspectives on this . Some never want to be left , some want to be left , some don't want to be the person turning off the machine , some want to be that . There is no one way . Okay , right , right , well , you can make it as un-messy as you can , right , it's as simple as that .

That is the doing some of the things that you need to do , like make an end-of-life directive and make sure that you know if X , y , z happens .

I want these following protocols to be put in place you can do those things hard as it is and you probably don't need to do them yet , but at some point you will , and that will make it easier , for by doing it , by you doing it , they don't have to do it on your behalf . So that is one .

Oh , I mean God , I don't even talk about Swedish death cleaning . I mean , I'm going to need a Swedish death crew to clean my house out here because I've got so much shit here . Yeah , I mean . But again , you could also see that as a kind of act of love and of the bequeathing of things and of the passing on of things .

And you know , again , people do really nice things .

I had a guy who had written little stories about all of the things that mattered to him and he'd hidden them all over his house and so when his family were clearing up and getting rid of all of his stuff , they found all these little notes that said oh , I remember when I first showed you this and I remember when I first bought this , and your mom and I

bought this so you can find ways to . Yeah , becomes . It's a designed , it's a design opportunity . It is a designed opportunity . You have designed a moment for your family to remember you through . That's how I would view it . Yeah , yeah , mm-hmm , I don't need you to see me like . This is the greatest gift , is the greatest gift my father ever gave me .

A it's the best creative brief ever . And B it liberated me from having to see the version of him that he didn't want to even look in the mirror and see for himself , never mind present to his son . So I think you're absolutely right . I think this idea of again , it's a loaded phrase , but creating creative briefs for the next generation

, I think , is a very powerful way to start to think about this . What am I going to pass on ? What am I going to ask them to do ? What am I going to not do ? What am I going to hide ? What am I going to conceal ? What am I going to ask them to do ? What am I going to not do ? What am I going to hide ? What am I going to conceal ?

What am I going to share ? How do I want them to discover me once I've gone . How do I want to be remembered ? All of these things are design opportunities for us to think about as we move forward . It's absolutely well .

I mean , I had a heart attack a couple of years ago and I woke up on the floor of a hotel room in London thinking , oh fuck , here we go . The end , here we go , here we go , right . So I'm sitting there in Euston Hospital in room three I'll never forget and suddenly crash , cart to room three , goes off and the entire universe just explodes off .

And you know , the entire universe just explodes and my entire thought was oh fuck , here we go , here we go . How am I going to meet this moment ? Right ? How am I going to meet this moment ? And am I going to try to not be one of those people who freaks out and be crazy ? I've studied this now .

I know enough about this to not be some crazy person , and so , of course , I was a crazy person and kept asking if I was going to die , was I having a stroke , and all the stuff that you do .

But once you're there and you realize that you're there , that's when it really shows up , when all this stuff that you've put in place all these years , all this thinking , all this history . That's when it really shows up , when you're staring it right in the face . That's when it really shows up for you . How am I going to behave in this moment ?

Yeah , yeah , exactly , natasha . Back to what I said . What's death taught you ? It has taught me to resolutely live . I am a better alive person for having dealt with death for so many years . I am more alive , I am more aware of the life around me , I am more grateful for life , I am more grateful for people who are enlivened .

And you know , the wonders of life are now technicolor in a way that they never were before . And I used to . You know , I was so cynical , I remember , you know , for years I was one of those sort of cynical , half empty kind of people and after all of this I was like I'm not going to do that anymore .

I'm not going to be I'm actually going to try to be my dad . I'm going to try to live up to my father's legacy for a change , and I'm actually going to be one of those people and I'm going to resolutely live and I have actually that's one thing I can say I've really done .

I've resolutely learned to live , and when I meet people , you included , and when I connect with somebody and I want to say something to them , I do , and so one of the things that death teaches you is it teaches you to be honest , because it's the ultimate tool of dishonesty . You can't cheat it , so you have to be honest . Thank you both .

If you do one thing after this call , call your mum and dad and tell them you love them . Just do that alone . I mean , I've given talks about this and the number of people who said oh , I called my dad in Austria . It was three o'clock in the morning and I just told him I loved him . And don't forget to do that kind of stuff .

And when you are faced with the final moments , enjoy whatever part of it you can . There is still joy in this journey , even to the very end . You're very welcome . Thank you both .