“At first it felt wrong. I felt like just as a society, we have a hard time talking about death. Understandably so, it's hard, right? It triggers not only our own fears, but it also triggers emotions and sadness from people that we've lost. And so they're difficult conversations to have. But it felt like, especially because there's so much of the fight mentality around cancer, that saying that to anybody else felt like I'm giving up and it felt like I'm not willing to fight. I'm letting people down. Not only am I now dealing with the crippling anxiety of death and dying, but now I'm also dealing with the crippling anxiety of letting people down by even saying and acknowledging those feelings…? But for me, it came from like, first I was terrified to look into anything. It just felt like I was doing something wrong by trying to investigate what it was like to die. But then once I got over that, where I personally found a lot of peace when I started hearing about near death experiences and end of life visions that Julie often talks about.”

“Our bodies without us even trying will do things to help us die and make it peaceful… The body makes you not hungry. The body makes you not thirsty. The body makes you sleep. The more you do that, the more you get in that cycle of not eating, drinking, and sleeping, your body goes into a ketosis cycle, which is different. It's not different than the diet, but with the diet you're still eating, so separate those two. But you can go into a ketosis where you actually feel euphoric. You actually have a natural pain analgesic that makes you feel better. So just biologically, to me, it is miraculous to have learned that being a hospice nurse and to see it with my own eyes. So like as an ICU nurse, you get so zoned in when you're in healthcare about which section of healthcare you're in, you know? So you're so used to being a certain way in an ICU nurse, giving all the fluids, doing all the things that you don't learn the other things, at least I didn't. So to see this shift in how being dry or being dehydrated at the end of life can be helpful was eye-opening. I never would have known that as an ICU nurse. Witnessing these biological processes made me realize how amazing our bodies are.”

“All I know is in watching people die a natural death, people need to know about this. People need to know about what it looks like and what happens to our bodies because it's not as scary as we think. And then when I think of my own mortality and I think about if I got diagnosed with something terminal tomorrow, I'm still human. I'm gonna have all the feelings, anger, sadness, scared. I'm still gonna be scared, but I also know that my body will take care of me. My body will take care of me. And I know that because I've witnessed it.”