Let's talk about death

THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

Death is one of life’s few inevitabilities, yet most of us live as if we’ll be here forever. Trudie McConnochie meets three women at the forefront of the positive death movement and learns how we can take back a little control over the way we cross that final frontier.

The look on his face told her everything. Vashti Whitfield had rushed to Auckland where her rapidly deteriorating husband, Andy, was receiving acupuncture treatment designed to boost strength in cancer patients. But the Welsh-born actor, who had steadfastly refused to consider the possibility of dying, had now taken a turn for the worse, and Vashti was determined to bring him back to Sydney to die.

Although she’d ridden an unimaginable roller-coaster of emotions over the 18 months since Andy’s diagnosis of non- Hodgkin lymphoma, nothing could prepare her for seeing her once-robust husband, the star of US TV series Spartacus, peacefully surrender to his final scene. Death, the inevitable fate that most of us spend our lives denying, was now claiming him at the age of just 39. And bearing witness to that remains one of the most powerful experiences of Vashti’s life.

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