After You’re Gone – a video presentation

https://share.descript.com/view/aGleOzdYkys 

You can access the A Good Death booklets, After You’re Gone, Flip the Script, and Great Last Impression here. 

Please note reproducing the content for commercial purposes or for use at scale (e.g. in a nursing home or as educational collateral at another presentation) is not permitted. If you wish to use our work in a workplace setting, as part of your doula work, and other profit-generating work, licensing does apply. Please contact us for more details.

TRANSCRIPT FOR AFTER YOU’RE GONE PRESENTATION

After You’re Gone – Lifting the Lid Festival

Jess LTL: [00:00:00] My name is Jess, I’ve got the enormous privilege of working both for Lifting the Lid and also for Unashamedly Six. Rebecca and Jessica, we’ve got Rebecca Lambert and Jessica Harkins, and I am going to tell you a little bit more about them with me.

Jess LTL: I want to make sure that we get it right. I’m going to introduce the wrong people, start telling you things that aren’t true. So Unashamedly Six create campaigns to help educate people about all kinds of issues, particularly end of life, and you will see that we have two extra bodies with us today. The back of Jessica’s camera, we’ve invited additional people, and we’re all people here who appreciate, um, Day of the Dead stuff.

Jess LTL: Would you like to introduce them?

Jessica: I don’t even know if they’ve got names, they’re just my, my beauties, my um, friggin beauties. [00:01:00]

Jess LTL: Okay, so, um, if you want to save the chat people, go in and then you’ll find them. And you’ll find there’s three dots and you click on that and you save it and then you’ve got all the juicy details of everything everybody does.

Jess LTL: At the end I’ll put in the link, lifting the lid links, because this is a completely unfunded project and it’s just a labour of love. And it’d be great if we could get people to donate through GoFundMe. So I’ll put that up at the end, don’t worry about it, I’ll put all the links up for Unashamedly 6 as well.

Jess LTL: If you need closed captions, they’re at the bottom here, and you can use those. Make sure you keep it in English. Um, and if you want to chat with each other, that’s also welcome. Um, and then I think that’s it, actually. If you want to ask questions, put questions in a big capital so that we know it’s a question.

Jess LTL: And that’s it, and I’m going to hand you over.

Rebekah: Awesome. Thanks so much for looking after us, Jess. [00:02:00] Um, as she mentioned, I’m Rebecca Lambert and I’m here with my co creator, Jessica Harkins. We are from Unashamedly Six and today we’ve got a little presentation for you about what happens after you’re gone.

Rebekah: Alrighty. So pop your questions in the chat at any time. We’ll grab them at the end of the presentation, but, um, this campaign is all about thinking about what happens after you’re gone.

Rebekah: Okay. So let’s take a moment to meditate on a person you love who is here or not. I’m just going to read something to you. Take a moment to think about someone you care about. Think about their face. Notice the lines, the contours, the texture. Notice the colour of their hair, eyes and skin. Do their eyes twist, roll or twinkle?

Rebekah: Were they crinkled with humour, wisdom [00:03:00] or suspicion? What are the little moments of the lips that betray their joy or their anger before they let the whole story shine from within? Cast your mind’s eye down to that face you know so well to the chest. Is it broad and soft or bony, bird like and fragile?

Rebekah: Think of the heart tick tick ticking within. Was there goodness to be found there? Was that the shape of their generosity? What sorts of words and size and shapes of all the weights of the world were taken into those lungs? What breath danced in those ribs? What kind of emotions, reactions, heartaches, and dreams did they keep to themselves?

Rebekah: What kinds of reactions, heartaches, and dreams did you find out in ways that you wish you hadn’t? Did they breathe life into every moment? Did they take your breath away? Meander that rolling eye further to their gut. Was that one of instinct? Or it was one [00:04:00] they didn’t trust? Was it filled with fire or was it laughter?

Rebekah: Was laughter more their style? Could you count on their intestinal fortitude? Or did the butterflies own it much more than they ever did? Were they hangry? Did they snooze with a belly full? What did and didn’t they do? And what did they not have a stomach for? Down to their bottom we go, to the wagon they were dragging, all no but to show, with the life that the bottom, with life, with that bottom one.

Rebekah: Ah, was life with that bottom one of honking geese and squeaking floorboards? Or was it pursed in silent condemnation of the silliest of human noises? Was it a bottom that got a good shaking on a dance floor? Could it nicely fill a pair of jeans? Did it find itself a favourite chair in its lifetime? Or was it the cushion to a lap many crawled into?

Rebekah: Oh, and look at those legs. Did legend have it they walked ten miles in the snow to go to school? Were they forever in [00:05:00] motion, right from the time they were a toddling baby until the years grew cold? Did they carry a certain air, whether in use or not? Were their legs for days? Did they know how to walk towards opportunity, or walk away from a fight?

Rebekah: Could they stand tall when needed, or did they make you weak at the knees? Imagine those feet. Did you ever, did they ever meet a pair of shoes they didn’t like? Did they make the best grappa? Were they light, so light, they were positively fleet footed? Could they smile and tap dance around any issue? Could they tiptoe around your feelings or trample them into the ground?

Rebekah: Are they walking beside you now? Are you in their footsteps right now? Picture their hands. What did they caress, shape and build? Were they weathered with labour and work? Or soft and supple with a life of self care? Would they give you the finger, or did they finger point at others? Could they click their fingers and [00:06:00] make magic appear?

Rebekah: Follow their hands to their mouth. Are they covering it in mirth or embarrassment? Are they asking you to be quiet, or trying to disguise a cheeky dimple? Was it a warm, generous mouth, or was it marked with serious lines? Did it portray their smoking, drinking, laughter, or other vices? Was their tongue something they tripped on, or was it clever as the day is long?

Rebekah: Did it stay silent most of the time, or did it always know the right words to say? And what would they say in this moment right now, now they’ve gone away?

Jessica: I love that. I love it so much.

Rebekah: Our point with today is the greatest gift you can leave isn’t your money. It isn’t your treasures. It is a better memory of you. So the myths and misconceptions that we go through when there’s death is that a will is all you need and that [00:07:00] they have the memories, it’ll be enough.

Rebekah: The secret should stay buried. Death isn’t something to talk about. Everyone will figure it out. No one’s going to miss you. And after you’re gone, it’s it, but we all know better. And that’s why we’re here today. The reality is. End of life planning includes care, emotional support, decision making, and tidying up your life, admin.

Rebekah: But it also means looking after memory, because that can be a kindness and a torture. You know, we need to think of ways to make death less traumatic, because the people we leave behind are the ones that tell our stories. Any absence is difficult. We know this when people go away, if divorce has happened, if relationships end.

Rebekah: But you can reduce the guesswork by actually planning. Properly for people, but not just your administrative stuff is Jess and I are going to show you not just the paperwork, not just the medical, although that is [00:08:00] vitally important. We’re talking about after you’re gone, how you can be there for someone.

Rebekah: So all the way. Sorry.

Jessica: That’s okay. I think it’s just, it’s if you never envision what it will be like. Okay. When you die, it’s such a shock to everybody when you actually do die. And it’s, it seems obvious cause you think, well, we’re all going to die someday. You know, it’s inevitable, you know, it’s going to happen, but if you never envision it when they’re gone, it’s just this awful, um, wall and, you know, having talked about it with them before they go, that wall is, it’s more broken down, it’s not this invisible barrier.

Jessica: So you really. Yeah, you get, uh, you, you get to keep them with you if you’ve had some of these conversations.

Rebekah: Absolutely. And this is, look, this is the thing all the way through this [00:09:00] presentation, excuse me, Jess and I have thought about questions because everybody’s experience of death is different.

Rebekah: Everybody’s family is different. We’re all tapestries of what we believe of what we’ve created, the educational experiences that we’ve had, even the trauma that might be All of the things that we’ve learned through religion and education, all these different places, heritage, history. What we need to look at is not necessarily, this is how it happens, you know, you have your funeral, you have your documents, you have your this, you have your that.

Rebekah: Think about it really, and even think about the deaths that you’ve experienced with your grandparents, your great grandparents, or people that you’ve lost. You know, what do you want the aftermath to look like? What do you want the grief to look like? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want people to feel?

Rebekah: What hole do you want to leave in your community? And what’s the great last impression that you leave with people? What is it going to look like? And what is it going to be? What’s [00:10:00] at stake if we don’t get it right? There’s six things that we’ve worked out here and, you know, this is all stuff that you would have seen in many of the presentations here from any of the people working in death, but emotional impacts, okay?

Rebekah: You’re leaving behind more stress, caregiver burnout, increased emotional distress for a dying person, unaddressed spiritual needs, increased socialize, socialization, ah, social isolation for grieving parties. Increased family disunity and potential for estrangement. Let’s not forget that if you don’t die well, your family is usually fractured as a result.

Rebekah: It’s like a bomb going off. Legal impacts, disputes, no power of attorney, guardianship for your pets and your dependents, wills not being in place, extended probates and estate settlements, and then also family businesses with no clear succession path. Quality of care. You know, you lose your physical [00:11:00] autonomy.

Rebekah: We know that 22 percent of people are over treated. This is a UK statistic. It parallels in Australia. 22 percent are over treated in medicalised environments for the fact that they don’t have an advanced care directive because nobody Knows what to do next. This is frightening stuff, folks. That means more costly treatments.

Rebekah: It means more invasive treatments. It means a loss of dignity. It means your family watching you as you lose dignity. It also means that there is a greater chance of cultural incident sense. Yeah, I’m having a really good day today. Cultural insensitivity in care choices. And that is across Everything from indigenous culture, through to, you know, Greek Orthodox, but also through, you know, queer culture, through, um, disability culture, the things that you care about.

Rebekah: You might be a goth, whatever the case may be, you know, uh, poor communication between medical staff and your loved ones and a lower quality of death. It also means financial problems. So costs [00:12:00] are always increased. People get overpaying for funerals as a common issue that occurs because things aren’t organized properly.

Rebekah: And it’s very easy for you to be talked into the big deluxe package when your heart is breaking on the floor. Financial strain for families and the dependents left behind because there’s no clear map of financial management. Um, and they can’t access it quick enough, even if it is, because there are issues with it.

Rebekah: And greater chance of insurance issues, because we all know that insurance companies are very risk adverse and don’t want to pay out. So they’ll block it if there’s not clear documentation. Potential for trauma. Complex grief, mental health issues, PTSD, prolonged suffering, um, inability to access care, financial and legal support, challenges that create stress points in the active stages of dying and the end of life and the palliative care stages.

Rebekah: Again, family unity comes up in all of this because people disagree over, What is a quality of life and they can’t let go and all this sort of stuff. And then [00:13:00] we have inaccurate depictions after we die. And this is where we’re sort of shifting into today. So our connection with people fades over time, you know, how they tell our stories, what they remember, the stories that have been left with the histories and the memories and the.

Rebekah: Books and the things that are left behind, these are gaps that people can embellish in. So you end up with the purple monkey dishwasher stories, you know, one person says one thing, and before you know it’s entirely another. And there’s also lost opportunities for comfort. And this is especially true of children.

Rebekah: If you’ve ever had A parent died to a child. If you speak to those children, they need to grieve at various stages as they get older, from younger through to teenagers, to make sense of the world. Over again, again, again, they revisit these stages. But most of the time, they won’t bring it up with their parent or significant.

Rebekah: People in their life, like their, you know, their uncles and their aunts and all the rest of it, because they don’t want to open up the wound and see the pain in the eyes of the people before them, but that they need this as part of their grieving [00:14:00] process so that they remember who that person was.

Jessica: I mean, I have to say, I included my kids as part of my grieving process for my dad.

Jessica: It was part of, like, letting them know this is who he was. This is the story. Like, warts and all, this is the story. And yeah, and they were only small at the time. And the most beautiful thing was having them draw me pictures of, you Well, this is your dad talking to you or, you know, you told that story about, you know, when he got really angry at you and then you all ended up laughing and they will draw it for me and it is, it’s so beautiful to say that they actually know who he, they really know who he is and he would love that.

Jessica: He, you know, and I, and it’s been very much a warts and all telling of this is who the guy was, he was no angel.

Rebekah: I love your dad’s stories. We should have included some of them, but it’s like, this is the thing, right? The kindness that you offer [00:15:00] after death is having those what’s and all stories. It’s answering the unanswered questions, it’s planning ahead, but it’s also remembering that life goes on in a meaningful way.

Rebekah: Because there’s something missing that I can’t put my finger on. Spoiler alert, that missing is you. We continue on with our lives and we have milestones, and we have moments where we go, Gosh, I wish you were here for that. And this is what people want after you’re gone. Jess and I collected this from different people.

Rebekah: And we’re not going to read them all out to you, but have a look at the list if you can see it, you know. It ranges from particular events to, Oh my gosh, I wish you were here to fix this. You know, like, whether that’s a kitchen cabinet or whether it’s a family disruption, we didn’t quite clarify. That’s the whole thing right?

Rebekah: There’s an empty seat at the table, missing the surprises and the spontaneity and the spark. These are the things that we want after we’re gone.[00:16:00]

Rebekah: And grief is oh so sensory, so one of the things that we commonly hear in grief. And from people in mourning and when we’re talking about them is that I wish I could hear your voice. I wish I could try almost cooking one more time. I wish I could smell their aftershave or perfume. I wish, you know, I had my Nan here to hold my hand right now.

Rebekah: I wish I could see you smile.

Jessica: Yeah, I’ve got a whole host of things. You know them? Soft pretzels, because he’s from Philadelphia, soft pretzels, Philly cheesesteaks, and his Old Spice deodorant. I can just have these things around me and all of a sudden it’s like, ah, dad, it’s a whole host of things.

Rebekah: That’s it.

Rebekah: My dad made the local news in Narooma, which is on the south coast of New South Wales, for the tiniest little clip of a comment. And it’s about the only audio that we’ve got of him. So every so often that audio gets a play.[00:17:00]

Rebekah: But this is the thing to remember as well. You’re already there. You’re borrowing the sayings, the looks, and the mannerisms. Any parent that’s ever looked down at their kid and gone, Gosh, I caught a glimpse of my father in that. Or, Gee, I just heard, you know, something my Nan would say. It’s in their laughter.

Rebekah: It’s also in the traits in the DNA that we’ve inherited. You know, looking at our certain features. phases of life. And when we look at our face in our, as we age, we can see our parents or our grandparents or the people that have come before us, but it’s also in their histories and their memories. It’s in those negative experiences.

Rebekah: It’s in those trauma reactions and those negative things that we have as well. The things that have shaped us, the belief systems, we inherit a lot of our financial literacy from people. And we don’t seem to realize, um, it’s the understanding of people in life, the choices and habits that we make. And.

Rebekah: This is the thing. It’s already still there and it’s who we are and it makes us who we are going forward. So it’s always good to remember where did that come from? [00:18:00] Because sometimes those ideas are good for us and also sometimes those ideas aren’t so good for us. So we maybe need to challenge them along the way.

Rebekah: So. We also went and collected a bunch of stuff from people and said, okay, so what have you got that reminds you of the people that are left behind? Uh, they, you know, that have left you that really speak to you. And again, you know, there’s video of me and a baby. There’s the, the vinyl collection every time we listen to the music, you know, but then there’s also a beautiful thing.

Rebekah: Like someone said, she recorded the sweetest speech for my wedding day. You know, their mum was dying of cancer, they knew they weren’t going to be there. So they recorded a speech so they could play it. This is a beautiful thing, you know, that sort of stuff. Having a tattoo on their arm to remind them wasn’t just about having a tattoo.

Rebekah: It was when they felt like they needed some comfort or to draw on the words of wisdom, they could look at that tattoo and remember that person. All of these sorts of things are [00:19:00] possible with a little bit of extra planning. We can be there for somebody’s wedding. We can be there for the times that they need.

Jessica: Yeah, and you can’t underestimate your worth and your meaning to people, so it might feel silly or it might feel like overdone or who, well, who am I? Why should I be doing this? Like, I’m nobody important, but you are just like, you’re just as important as like, you know, you’re a rock star to these people that when you die, you know, that you’re leaving behind, you know, they want you.

Jessica: Every little tiny, I would scour the internet to find, you know, places where my dad had interacted with people so I could hear just that little bit more of like who he was and what he was, what he was like.

Rebekah: Absolutely. And this is the other thing too, you can lessen pain by getting rid of those unanswered questions.

Rebekah: So [00:20:00] the first question, if you reverse engineer everything is a question of dying. What do you want your great last impression to be? So Jessica and I worked on a campaign. It was our first campaign that we put here for lifting the lid, which was your last great impression. And it’s the whole idea of we think so much about the first impression, but we don’t think about the last impression we’re going to make with a person.

Rebekah: Why is that? And so we looked at the fact that. looking at that was the last impression someone would have of you. This was the memory they had of you, you know, maybe struggling to die in hospital or maybe forgetting to say the things that you needed to say and all that sort of stuff. Then we looked at how do you want to flip the script on death and dying?

Rebekah: So for many people, death has always seemed like, well, you know, you don’t talk about it, you get a will, you get an estate, a couple of documents, and then what you do is you. [00:21:00] Um, go and have a funeral and then awake, and then occasionally you’ll remember something about them when you stumble over a photo or whatever the rest of it.

Rebekah: But there’s also this other side of it, which is, we don’t have to follow those rules. We can make death in any any form that we want it to be. And for a lot of people that are, um, missing their family, so they’ve been excluded by their family because of their religion, who they’ve chosen to love, um, their sexuality, anything like that, or people that have moved across country.

Rebekah: Or that kind of stuff, you know, there’s this necessity to look at what you’ve got there and change it. So we looked at what it’s like to die in conditions where maybe you get friends to help you or the neighborhood, or you look at the people closest to you so that you can have a death that reflects you.

Rebekah: And now this third one, we’re looking at how do you want to be, how do you want people to be? [00:22:00] After you’re gone. So we’re looking after that process of saying, how can you comfort them even after your death?

Jessica: Yeah, well my good friend died last year and her family went into complete denial, didn’t have a funeral for her, didn’t have any kind of service, no remembrance, no nothing. And thank God for the art community in Lismore who decided, well, we’re not having them. She was so important to us that we are going to do What we know she would have loved, which is, we all got to, I flew up to Lismore, we all got together and we did an artwork for her and filmed it.

Jessica: And it was all about moment to be about Joe. And, um, you know, I was so upset that her family hadn’t done anything. And then in retrospect, I was like, well, this was her family that Lismore community. Be that our community, that was her family. If her, her fa, if her blood relatives weren’t [00:23:00] gonna step up and do anything, then this was her actual family.

Jessica: And so, you know, I think, um, she would’ve loved to have had a say in it. But being that she didn’t get to have a say in it, I feel like we did her proud.

Rebekah: Absolutely. And that’s. So we’re getting thunder and lightning here in Wollongong. We’re getting one of that coastal storms. Um, that’s the important thing to remember folks is that it doesn’t have to look and feel a certain way.

Rebekah: You have control over setting this up so that it can be something that you and your family and the people that you care about, your friends and your community can all grieve to.

Jessica: Now, I can’t think of anything more tragic than like a flamboyant gay person having to have a straight religious funeral because their family took over.

Jessica: I think it’s like, that’s like massively, you know, and that happens all the time, you know, because that’s the script. Okay, well your family looks after it and then this is how we always go and we have a minister and if that’s not how you live, that shouldn’t be how you die. [00:24:00]

Rebekah: Exactly. So if you want to check out our website, it’s a good death.

Rebekah: com. au. And you’ll see those two previous campaigns along with this third one. And there’s blogs and stuff to help you to find your community elsewhere and to make a great last impression. And also this booklet will be up as well. So the unanswered questions. Let’s think about this, you know,

Rebekah: what did you want to know about your ancestors, the people that you never met, your grandparents, your great grandparents, the great great great grandparents? What mysteries has your family carried around that you would have loved to have seen solved in your lifetime? And what information is still unclear to this day?

Rebekah: I mean, I grew up in a family where secrets were the everyday and nobody told you anything. And I still don’t know even medical history stuff for me as a person. And there are still people living, let alone [00:25:00] anything else, you know, What do you miss about the people that you’ve loved and you’ve lost? What would you have liked to have said to them before they were gone?

Rebekah: And have you ever looked at a moment in your life and wished, gee I wish you were here? What other questions are there hanging around you? And how does it feel to experience that?

Jessica: That was the biggest thing, was not being able to talk to my dad about the fact that a cardboard coffin is not the cheapest option.

Jessica: He was like, it’s the cheapest option, I want the cheapest, I just want whatever’s not going to cost a lot of money, put me in a cardboard box. And I’m sitting there with the funeral director and he’s like, That’s not the cheapest option. I wanted to be able to say, Dad, did you know, did you know, this is not even the cheapest option?

Jessica: Thank God we’d at least had that conversation. But yeah, it apparently it’s, what is it? Um, it’s balsa wood or some sort of, some sort of cheap wood that is cheaper than cardboard. So who knew?

Rebekah: [00:26:00] There you go. Um, and that’s, that’s the thing. Like we don’t know these things unless we have these conversations and you know, they also don’t know you unless you have these conversations, you know, what makes you unique?

Rebekah: What will others say about you? What made your life worth living? What were your values and your principles that guided you through life? You know, what were those guardrails that put through things? What were the histories? That you carry, that you know that you would like to leave for other people? What words and phrases are you known for?

Rebekah: I mean, with my dad, he had a very particular turn of phrase, and so after he died, I wrote a dictionary because he was called daggy dad or daggy for short. And writing a dictionary was a way of keeping all of his funny little. Phrases and words alive. Um, what choices have you made that are good, bad or indifferent?

Rebekah: And what helped you get to the conclusions? [00:27:00] You know, one of the things that I found was that my dad was very much on the right wing of politics. I’m very much so left leaning. It’s, um, I’m almost falling over, but we still had these amazing conversations. Because we created a space where we could talk about politics.

Rebekah: And then from the politics came the values and from the values came the mental health conversations that we both needed while he was dying. And I’m quite thankful for that, but I would have also have liked to have continued on those conversations in various different forms and had them now to listen to on a podcast or something like that, to keep him with me.

Rebekah: Whenever I find myself wondering about any of those areas.

Rebekah: It’s also about a question of being there. So, what would you say at life’s great milestones. What do you wish other people had left behind? What does life purpose and fulfillment look [00:28:00] like to you? And what do you want your loved ones to do to honor you? Really, truly, you know, Christmas table. Do you want to drink sitting where your place used to be?

Rebekah: Do you want them to sing a certain song? Do you want them to, to laugh at a certain moment in time? If they miss you, where are they going to seek comfort? What’s that one bit of wisdom or the poetry book or the saying or something? That you’d love to leave behind. Um, how would you like to be included in family celebrations?

Rebekah: How would you like to take part in anniversaries and parties? And what do you want people to remember when time is tough?

Jessica: I mean, I think it’s about, you know, real compassion and real love because you’re showing your loved ones how to die. Like kind of giving them a roadmap for this is, this is how to do it. And I think it makes it less scary. You know, it’s inevitable, we’re all going to die. So, you know, like let’s help each other [00:29:00] do it.

Jessica: Like how do you do it? You know, I think, um,

Rebekah: yeah,

Jessica: writing these things and letting people know these things just gives them a bit of a roadmap to follow for after you’re gone.

Rebekah: Absolutely. And I’m sure as a parent, Jess, you would have moments where you would have really liked to have memories of your dad around for your kids.

Rebekah: You know,

Jessica: yeah. And amazingly though, like my son made me this Lego sculpture and there’s my dad and he’s got a beer in one hand and he’s got like my dad don’t make Lego cigarettes, but he had like my kid put a flaming thing coming out of his other hand. And he’s got a bathrobe on. And I was like, how did you know?

Jessica: Like you, you were 14 months old when he died. I must’ve done a really good job. Yeah.

Rebekah: Like those cigarettes and bathrobes. Good thing that was at home and maybe not at school.

Rebekah: And this is the thing, you know, [00:30:00] what are you leaving behind the hobbies and pastimes? Do you have remarkable penmanship? Will they get phrases that they’ll get a chuckle out of? What was your signature dance move? You know, where you were always on the dance floor as soon as you heard the nut bush. What do you always wear that everybody wished that you wouldn’t?

Rebekah: How do you show your humor and where does your fandom lie?

Jessica: Yeah, I love that. That’s my favorite one is because that’s the stuff that comes up without you having to look for it. You know, if they loved, you know, Marvel comics or they loved like Batman or something, then every time you see it, you’re like, Oh, that’s, you know, like my grandmother was gold shoes.

Jessica: So I’ve ever seen someone struggling or falling asleep or like, you know, chittering along in gold high heels.

Rebekah: That’s fantastic. My dad had really good taste in music. So whenever I, excuse me, see albums from like red hot chili peppers or cream or can’t [00:31:00] hate or that sort of stuff, I immediately think of my dad.

Rebekah: And there’s also a little of you in this. So what can you create? What can you curate? You don’t have to be an artist, a writer, a poet, a musician, a dancer, a photographer, to be able to give people things. You might be able to give them, you know, the collected works of the poems that really meant something to you.

Rebekah: Or perhaps you might give them your record collection or your toy cars, or whatever that might be. What can you offer? What questions can you answer for people that they may want to know? What comfort can you give? What milestones do you want to be a part of? And how can you make it easier for people?

Rebekah: These are really simple questions, but when you sit down with a cup of tea in a short moment, it all becomes very clear that you can really do some powerful stuff.

Jessica: My uncle gave us all a [00:32:00] gift when, and you know, this is something that obviously can’t happen with unexpected death, but you know, maybe you can try and do a little bit, keep in touch with people, but he knew he was dying.

Jessica: And so he called all of us, all my cousins, he called, you know, his brothers and sisters. He gave each one of us a phone call where we all knew this was it. This was the last phone call we were ever going to get, you know. And, um, It gave me so much comfort because I knew and he, you know, we kind of didn’t put too much emphasis on the fact that this was going to be the last phone call, but we, but we all knew.

Jessica: And so, you know, we made sure to say the things. And so we’d, I didn’t, I don’t have that grief afterwards. Oh, I never got to tell him, you know, whatever it was. It’s like he faced up to it and gave us the gift saying, here we go. This is it. Wow. That’s so powerful.

Rebekah: Oh, so what tools can you use? Well, as Jess just rightly pointed out, you could even use a telephone, but you can also use legal and medical [00:33:00] documentation, care plans and advanced care directives, legacy books and booklets.

Rebekah: So we have three booklets on our website. Well, we’ll have three booklets on our website once I put the third one up. Sorry, folks have been running late. Um, that you can use to get all this information down as a starting point and then move on to other things on our website. Um, You can do video diaries and messages and snippets.

Rebekah: You know, I’m sure there’s going to be death TikTok reels in the near future from people, audio recordings, songs, podcasts. Honestly, that whole, I wish I could hear the sound of their voice. I wish I could remember what they sounded like is such a big thing. Do it. Record these sorts of things. Online technology.

Rebekah: Um, you could use Dropbox to collect a bunch of stuff. You know, it doesn’t have to be highfalutin, high tech kind of stuff, just a repository of things. Online portals. Have a website. Um, decide what you want to do with your social media, whether you want to memorialize it or you’ll keep it going. These sorts of things can be really important for the [00:34:00] grief process.

Rebekah: I know a friend of mine, she suicided sadly in 2017 and we found going to her Facebook. At particular points in time, like her birthday and the anniversary of her death, quite comforting to go and have a conversation, not just with Yvonne, but with the other people that were having conversations with Yvonne and sharing memories of those times.

Rebekah: Um, journals, diaries, letters, histories, scent cards, and perfumes, you know, spraying something and putting it in a shoe box on a little bit of cardboard so that someone can remember you or telling everybody what. The washing powder is that you use that makes the clothes smell all kind of mum or whatever the situation is, or that recipe for apple, you know, that.

Rebekah: At Christmas time, that sort of thing. I think

Jessica: this is part of the reason that we made our sorry to cut you off back. This is, this is part of the reason that we made our booklets is, you know, it is for us, but we’re all and, you know, everybody who’s joined us today. We’re obviously. [00:35:00] We’re Already interested in the death space.

Jessica: We’re already thinking about it more, but it’s, it might be really confronting for somebody who you love, who is dying, who is in denial or they don’t want to speak about it. Or, you know, when it’s really hard to bring it up, so. It can be easier saying, Hey, to this presentation, I got this booklet. I’d really love to go through it with you.

Jessica: And then that’s the start of the conversation. Um, so literally having the booklet, you know, like printing it out or having your computer in front of them and just saying, Hey, can we go this? I really, I want you to help me. Can we go through this together? And it’s a good way to start the conversation.

Rebekah: Absolutely. And we take it from a social perspective because we’re not lawyers and we’re not doctors, but we take it from the social perspective, which starts the conversation so that maybe it’s easier to get a reluctant person to then take the next step and go and have a chat to the lawyer or to talk about what they need in a medical setting, [00:36:00] feeling more empowered and feeling less.

Rebekah: Caught up in stigma and all the rest of it, because we do know that sadly, there’s still stigma in older generations and even Gen X around death, dying illness and disability. We kind of need a bit of an on ramp too. So that’s what we’ve designed our booklets to do. And this is the sort of thing that you can use to make it fun.

Rebekah: You know, let’s record a video. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make an artwork. Let’s collage up a bunch of photos so that it takes a little bit of the heaviness off it as well.

Rebekah: So what gaps can you fill? So think about, you know, what do you care people keep? One of the hardest things that most people face is that when somebody dies, they’ve got a whole life full of stuff. You know, we’re talking full apartments or units or houses, um, with even storage and all the rest of it. [00:37:00] And people are grieving.

Rebekah: They’re not sure what to keep, what to get rid of and all the rest of it. So if you can be specific about, look, I really don’t mind. This could go to charity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But do keep my good China. Cause I’d love to think of you using it at family, you know, gatherings or whatever, then that can be really helpful to people.

Rebekah: You know, do you care if they keep, traditions alive and certain things, you know, then maybe let them know that. Um, what do you care that they don’t really need to worry about in the scheme of things? What doesn’t matter to you? You know, um, what mistakes did you do that inspired you to do better? What mistakes did you wish you hadn’t faced in life?

Rebekah: You know, this can be a little bit of a, you know, when you get to be my age and you’re worrying about what your career should be and all this sort of stuff, take a load off, go and travel for a little bit, come back. All of this kind of stuff means something to [00:38:00] people if you can collect it. Um, and what did you really like about people?

Rebekah: One of the saddest things, especially in very white Western cultures, is that people generally don’t talk about it.

Rebekah: They don’t stop you and say, I really admire that about you. I really enjoy doing this with you and all this stuff. It’s all very stitched up and very clinical in a lot of respects. So if you are in those sorts of households and in these sorts of things, and you, and you still can’t say it because for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel right, or it doesn’t feel comfortable, write it down.

Rebekah: Because those are the unanswered questions that people have. They don’t know unless you explain it to them. And what do you wish for their future? What would you like to see have happened to them?

Jessica: I mean, I think really coming back to like just physical stuff as well, it’s really important to let people know what to do with that stuff because they’re either going to keep it all [00:39:00] at feeling that they can’t throw any of it away because it’s like throwing a piece of you away, but it’s not, or they’re going to get rid of it all because it’s all too painful to deal with.

Jessica: So if you just leave them a little list, this is important. This is not important. That bit’s so much easier.

Rebekah: Absolutely. Especially if you’ve got treasures that are, you know, are actually worth something, um, and you’re not aware of, because even things like stamp books, um, for a very long time there I made quite a lot of money getting antique clothing and antique stamps from auction houses because people would put in estates and not knowing what they’d have.

Rebekah: There were a You know, things like 5, 000 stamps sitting in books. If there was communication within the family, that stamp might have at least been used towards something. You know what I mean? Instead of just ending up in an auction house somewhere. So, what do you not want to leave behind?

Rebekah: Just that I firmly believe. [00:40:00] that what we really should be gifting each other is permission for them to be this themselves. It’s an opportunity to surprise us. It’s the motivation to change. It’s the care that they couldn’t give to themselves that they can give to us. It’s the advice and the guiding light.

Rebekah: It’s the safe harbor in life’s little storms. And it’s also the ability to tap into that history and that courage and that sense of humor and all of the things that went before by knowing who you are and knowing where to go for it. Even the tiniest little thing can help people through grief. Just as the tiniest little thing can trigger us when we’re grieving.

Rebekah: Oh, I just heard a song and it’s made me think, oh, I’ve just smelt something and all, all the memories have come flooding back. Oh, it’s the anniversary. These small things, we can also do small things to love someone after we’re gone.[00:41:00]

Rebekah: So, how do you give a map after you’re gone? Okay, well, have your shit together. Facing tough conversations and situations, not leaving your things untidy, doing the extra work, doing the documentation, getting those advance care plans and advance care directives. Honestly, From my perspective, I think they’re more important than the will stuff.

Rebekah: Um, this is the sort of thing that we need to think about by letting them know how you feel, by passing the history down in the things that we say, sharing our approach to life by the habits and the values and the approaches and the ideas, you know, It’s such a thing that we just don’t crack open with people.

Rebekah: We have surface level conversations, we know where they might sit in politics or, or whatever, but we really don’t know where they sit on a lot of issues. You know, a difference in perspectives on how they view you and view death, a better view of themselves, [00:42:00] and also letting them know you, the real you, in a very special way.

Jessica: That’s what we were talking about, about social media, how You might have a bunch of different views and it’s kind of important or it’s, it’s, it’s a good thing to let the different sections of your different life. No, I’m not family. Jess is different to work Jess. And he’s different to the one who hangs out with my friends.

Jessica: And so like letting people in on that gives them, Like a much bigger, better picture and also then it like stops any awkwardness at the funeral when people are like, who are you?

Rebekah: Yeah, exactly. I was like, why is that going in the coffin? I don’t really understand the joke. You don’t need to.

Rebekah: But most of all, when we give people documents, when we give people time, when we have [00:43:00] conversations, when we do these things, when we create the memory books, when we collect all the photos up on Dropbox, when we record the voice in a podcast or create a history, we give them the opportunity to heal or not.

Rebekah: And that’s the best gift of all you can give after you’re gone, is giving someone the opportunity to heal, even if your relationship is incredibly complex. You can still find kindness and empathy and ways to do things by leaving little bits behind.

Rebekah: Alrighty. So that’s I just

Jessica: saw someone comment about the living funeral and like, I absolutely agree. Like basically, like that’s a fantastic idea. I, I, I a hundred percent encourage everybody to have their funeral before they die. Because I think why the hell not? It’s like the best birthday [00:44:00] ever. Like come and celebrate me.

Jessica: Tell me what you love about me

Rebekah: now

Jessica: while I’m here.

Rebekah: Absolutely. Absolutely. Freaking lutely. So this is us. We’re Jessica and Rebecca. We do storytelling. We do across different things. We tackle the evidence based stuff, the mental health safe language. We mash it up. We’re Gen X, so we love our pop culture and we’re trying to make death and other things inclusive so that people don’t feel left out of the process, out of this very straight white hetero family orientated dying process in Australia, for example, that really needs to be broken open and made a little bit more inclusive.

Rebekah: So thank you for joining us today for our presentation. I guess we open up for some questions if anyone has any.

Jessica: So I just saw that last one that came in saying, where are we located? So we’re Both New South Wales, but [00:45:00] like different spots. I’m Northern Beaches of New South Wales. Um, on, we don’t know whose land it is that we’re on in the Northern Beaches because we so decimated the Aboriginal population that we can’t trace the history.

Jessica: So we cannot do a thank you and a welcome to our country. in the Northern Beaches. The Elders are still discussing it.

Rebekah: Mm. That’s terrible, isn’t it? And I am from Wollongong. Well, actually I’m from Windang in the Illawarra, which is 90 minutes south of Sydney. Um, and Windang is a very, very important part of the Aboriginal culture down here.

Rebekah: It is the mighty, mighty Darwul Nation with the Wodi Wodi people. Uh, and Windang means place of fighting. And people used to come here and fight. They’d get together as a tribe and If I had a beef with Jess, I’d tell her I had a beef with her and we might have a conversation and we might get into [00:46:00] biffo even.

Rebekah: And then we would go fishing and pruning and swimming, get it all out of our system, all done in one day. And I think that that is a really beautiful way to look at the world. Um, because it just gets all of the silliness out of the way and all of the drama. So, yeah, I’m just having trouble. What have

Jessica: you done to your hand?

Jessica: Somebody wants to know what you’ve done to your hand.

Rebekah: As a woman with disabilities, I don’t really feel comfortable answering that question.

Jessica: I’m going to tell you, I’ve got some sort of like carpal tunnel thing happening in my hand, which I need to go and just have a look

Jess LTL: at. There’s some really lovely things in the chat going back and I haven’t answered all of them because some of them are, um, things that only you can answer. So we’ll just, if you just have a quick look through.

Jess LTL: That’s some really nice comment. [00:47:00] Aww. And I know that we’ve got Dead Good here, uh, who are doing really similar things to you. They’re really brilliant. Are you able to come on, Katie? Or are you not in the mood? Or Lindsay? Photographs. I completely agree, Francoise. I have the same issue. Here you go. Well, there’s Victoria.

Jess LTL: Some of these are so funny. I tried that with my dad just prior to his death. He demanded Mrs. Black’s Chinese. I cannot. Find said restaurant. It’s now become a joke between close friends and makes me smile. That’s fantastic. Katie’s in bed. She’s Katie’s gonna stay in bed. I don’t blame you. Um, what else have we got?

Jess LTL: Do save the chats because it’s really Nice to go back over them. Katie, when my dad was dying, I recorded 50 [00:48:00] conversations across his last year. He loved doing this. I did it to connect with him, but also to create a grandie archive for his grandchildren. I listened to one of the recordings yesterday. So dead good legacies, Katie and Lindsay, as siblings who are doing something really, really similar in the north of England.

Jess LTL: So it’s really interesting to see that happening all over. Absolutely. Beautiful, beautiful, um, styling. We tend to, sorry, continue. I was just

Rebekah: going to say, if anyone wants a copy of the presentation, it’ll be on our website and the recording, but if you want a copy of the booklet, do me a favor and pop your email address in the chat and I will save the chat and then that way I can send it to you because otherwise I’ve got no way of getting it to you.

Rebekah: It’s really

Jess LTL: beautiful. Everybody really loved it. Um,

Rebekah: the poem was my poem, by the way. Yeah.

Jess LTL: I [00:49:00] have just put in, while I’m here thinking about it, I have just put in again about the fact that this is a completely unfunded, um, voluntary festival and that you can donate or go to the Lifting the Lid store for t shirts and stuff.

Jess LTL: So it’s a voluntary. It’s a great thing that happens every year and it’s so great and we can’t keep hosting it every year, making ticket prices affordable unless we have donations. So the GoFundMe link is here and the Lifting the Lid store is here. And also if you’re looking to find these two marvelous people, all of the links are in the chat and there’s loads of them.

Jess LTL: It looks like they’re all over, all over everything. There’s loads of emails there at the bottom. I’m just going to scroll up because I know there were other things. Yeah, cool. I love that Chinese. It’s so funny. Amelia says we tend to prepare the box for a newborn. Then we tend to quit it over time. And then we get back to it once one’s [00:50:00] dead.

Jess LTL: It is to upload the box in between.

Jessica: I love that so much. And this is like my story because, you know, my mother was just like part of a, you know, very. It’s sort of a Whole Foods, you know, organic everything coven, and they did everything natural birth and home birth, and it was all about the babies and the start of life and, you know, birthing doulas and, you know, and I can’t believe that this same group of women is in such massive denial about death.

Jessica: They, they set us up so well to start off with and then they just dropped off completely. So I’m doing my best to, you know, seed the ideas that, you know, we can do the same. Let’s, we must do the same kind of care and attention for death as we do for start of life. Totally,

Rebekah: totally. And this is the, it’s the saddest thing that we do.

Rebekah: Is we look at death as an entirely separate event when really [00:51:00] death is not even the end of our life. Because we live in the memory of other people and we live in their lives and the things that they’ve learned from us. And yet we leave this terrible last impression. Like my dad’s death was not particularly, he was afraid of the chemo after 11 years of cancer, but he was afraid of death more.

Rebekah: So he got over treated and over medicalized. And He shortened his life by being overtreated and it was just the saddest of things, because if he’d had a few more conversations, I think he would have felt a lot more confident with what he was going through, but because he didn’t, that’s what we got left with.

Rebekah: And I’m sure. If he had the opportunity to see what would happen, he would never want to have done that to any of us.

Jessica: Yeah, and it’s terrifying. You can’t terrify the younger people or even your older people, the people that you’re leaving behind when you go. My mother’s mother, Had never [00:52:00] thought about the fact she was going to die.

Jessica: And my mom said they were all gathered around her bed and it was like, she was being sucked into a black vortex and screaming as she went, trying to hold onto them. And I was like, what shit? No, no excuse my French. But like, Jesus, I don’t want to like, I don’t want to make anyone feel that terrified about dying.

Jessica: I mean, I feel for her. But, you know, let’s think about it before we’re at that point.

Rebekah: Absolutely.

Jess LTL: I’ve got a really good one. Francoise has put some really lovely things in, including what sort of things were in the ductionary?

Rebekah: The ductionary.

Jess LTL: I think we all want to know that.

Rebekah: Um, he called, and I don’t know why, because it wasn’t his history, but he called porridge burgoo, so whenever he wanted porridge, it was like time for burgoo, and I believe that that actually comes from Welsh.

Rebekah: dialect, but he’s [00:53:00] not the Welsh side of the family, which was a bit strange, but that was, that was one of the things, um, uh, just too many, to be honest, many of them you can’t repeat because he was rather ribald, uh, electrician by trade, spent a lot of time with, Nude calendars everywhere. So, um, Lots of mention of boobs.

Rebekah: Actually, we put this memorial chair here in Wollongong on Perkins Beach, which overlooks Port Kembla. He apprenticed at the Port Kembla Steelworks as an electrician when he was younger, and the chair overlooks the nudist beach on the way to the memorial. The Port Kembler still works. So it’s kind of like this double whammy, because there’s dogs on one side, boobs on the other, and where he started his younger life.

Rebekah: So it works really well for us.

Jess LTL: That’s so brilliant, because it’s so different to you. And I’ve only known you five minutes, but I just completely know that that’s a very different person. [00:54:00] How lovely that these two really different people could connect like that. We forget that that’s a possibility, isn’t it?

Jess LTL: Absolutely. I’ve got one more message here. Francoise, uh, one of my fave quotes from my late hubby was that will come in handy one day. Incorporated that into his eulogy. Francoise has recently been bereaved again. I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry, Rebecca.

Rebekah: I was going to say, I’ve got One of those kinds of partners in the living room at the moment.

Rebekah: I’m still trying to get him to clean out the shed. This is it. I should have had him in here for this presentation. I don’t want to clean the shed if something happens to him.

Rebekah: That’s

Jess LTL: right. The stuff of nightmares, isn’t it? All the detritus. Stuff of nightmares. That’s it. That’s it. That

Jessica: was the worst thing. So I didn’t have that conversation with my dad. What should I keep? What should I get rid of? So I kept way too much and then stored it under my [00:55:00] partner’s house. And then there were, there were rat got in and weighed all over it all.

Jessica: So that made culling it really easy. So I was like, well, that’s gone. Yeah. And it was like, I had kept a bunch of stuff with me that was up on a shelf. Yeah. And all the rest of the stuff. I was like, well, I can’t get rid of it. It’s my dad. I can’t get rid of all that, you know? And it was like, after the rat went on it, I was like, that’s a sign, you know?

Rebekah: I just love that idea. Every sister that I’ve turned up, you know, he’s got his bathrobe and he’s cigarette and he’s gone, well, I think I might turn them into a rat and pee over everything. So she finally lets me go. Uh,

Jess LTL: Katie is asking us this session has been so real and refreshing. Do the shed conversation for Lifting the Lid next year.

Jess LTL: Oh, yeah. The shed. Yeah, that’s it. Oh my goodness, all the man caves in there. Yeah, all of it. There

Rebekah: it is.

Jess LTL: So [00:56:00] has anyone else got any more questions? We’ve got a couple of minutes, and if you haven’t, we’ll start putting you into your waiting room. The bit that me and Victoria hate, where you have to tell you what to leave.

Jess LTL: It’s really hard. Alrighty folks, we’ll just drop you an email. You’re very welcome, yeah. Please do get in touch if you want to. So, anyone else? Anything?

Rebekah: Drop your email in if you want a copy of the booklets and we’ll send that out to you. Um, last chance, last chance. Right, that’s it. You’re done. Done. We’re getting rid of you all.

Rebekah: Linda just scraped under there like, um, Indiana Jones with their hat as the doors went closed.

Jess LTL: Who am I keeping in? Jane? Um, no, you’re keeping me and you’re keeping, um, Lucy Woodsker. Awesome. Oh yes, of course, of course, yeah. Okay, bye everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you again. Sorry it’s so