Death Literacy: What Caring For The Dying Teaches The Living

Most of us will care for someone dying, and almost none of us are taught how. Psychologist and researcher Kerrie Noonan wants to change that.

Kerrie coined the framework of "death literacy" — our collective skills, experience, action and knowledge around death and dying — and has spent the last decade researching what actually helps people navigate loss well. In this conversation she explains why death literacy sits in communities, not just individuals, why normalising conversations about death only gets us so far, and what she learned bringing her own mother home to die. She also unpacks the idea of an "emotional will" — a way of passing on memory and meaning that has nothing to do with money — and why grief doesn't move through neat stages, no matter what we've been told.

Kerrie is a psychologist, palliative care bereavement coordinator, and researcher connected to La Trobe University's Public Health Palliative Care Unit and the Death Literacy Institute.

Expect to walk away thinking differently about grief, ritual, and what it actually means to be prepared — not scared — of death.