How To Die

Karen Borochowitz founded Dementia South Africa over 20 years ago, after caring for her mother who had Alzheimer's Disease.

She shares a lifetime's worth of wisdom and insight into how to care for someone living with a dementia, how it impacts families and what they can do, and discusses stigma and the challenges experienced in South Africa.

Jill Katz is the person you want by your side to help navigate all the stuff a loved one leaves behind. Both super-practical and compassionate, Jill is blessed with intuition and a deep understanding of neurodivergent behaviour, and how we can all get stuck and overwhelmed. She provides a set of simple systems that help guide you through the clutter, and clear things away – materially, emotionally and cognitively – to unlock your true potential.  

Keshnie Mathi is the Grief Companion - a human compendium of diverse emotion, humour, compassion and wisdom, wrapped in the professional ability to listen. In this episode, she details how she supports people in their grief. And at the end of the episode are a few ways you too can support someone experiencing the pain of loss.

Dr Ivan Schewitz is a veteran explorer of the thoracic cavity, having saved and improved many lives in his long and pioneering surgical career. In this episode, he reflects on what a lifetime's work has taught him about life and death, and the responsibility that he carries. He shares intimate experience about what it's like to save a life, and to lose one, and how best to communicate this to a family. A warm and affable man with great experience, related with humility and kindness.

Adriaan Bester has a clear eye and a steady hand, in a business that provides a service as old as time. His insight, compassion and sensitivity is perfectly suited to this culturally diverse country, steeped in traditional rites and rituals about death and dying. Yet Adriaan is an innovator, unafraid to introduce new technologies and new options for people who have lost a loved one. His experience is unique - and he relates it with kindness and warmth.

Dr. Mary Ryan is a priest and soul carer, someone with great experience of providing spiritual care at the end of life. In this episode, she discusses her journey toward priesthood, and the challenges she experiences as a woman and feminist. She explains what is meant by soul care, and what it's requirements are, as well as sharing a useful model of the stages of dying which helps us understand the needs of the dying person. Mary is a teacher and the inspiration behind the Soul Carers Network, an affiliation of soul carers with many different skills and aptitudes based in South Africa.

Ela Manga is an integrative medical doctor, highly attuned to the relationship between different systems in the body. She has a deep experience of death, and how breath plays a leading part in how we live and how we die. Her work is radical and gentle, profound and compassionate. She shares her insight, and some of the keys to using a healing tool that’s right under our noses.

Veteran teaching midwife Ciske van Straaten has vast experience of helping to bring life into the world, and has also been intimately involved in death. What has this taught her? What have these two moments got in common? How do they relate to each other, in the cycle of life?

Author of 'Crossing the River Styx - Memoirs of a Death Row Chaplain,' Russ Ford shares his experience of accompanying those condemned to die in their final years, months and earthly moments. A humble, courageous and powerful story of unlikely redemption, this is a record of a remarkable experience, a testament to compassion in the face of institutionalized savagery.

A brief yet comprehensive tour of the issues surrounding the legal challenge to grant South Africans the right to die, and autonomy over their own lives. For more, see DignitySA