Talking about the end-of-life is never easy or enjoyable. For some, it’s either a taboo topic, a triggering one, or both. As someone who’s experienced the loss of both of her parents before the age of 35, I can easily relate to the complicated feelings death and caregiving bring. However, some people are actively transforming how we think and talk about, and plan for the end of life.
Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider believes that dying isn’t a medical issue, it’s a human issue and part of the human experience. From that belief and the realization that many healthcare professionals focus on the medical aspects of dying, and not necessarily caretaking, palliative care and grief, requires a broader perspective and empathy, which is why in 2017, she founded her non-profit, End Well, which is dedicated to the belief that all people should experience the end of life in a way that matches their values and goals.
Ungerleider and the End Well team creates a community that unites design, technology, health, policy, and activist initiatives to transform how the world thinks about caregiving, grief, illness, and the end-of-life experience with the ultimate goal of creating a future where ending well becomes a measure of a life well-lived.
“I started this organization because I witnessed a lot of suffering from my patients who were spending their final moments of life in the intensive care unit. They were very sick and hooked up to tubes and machines and hidden away from loved ones. I realized that the conversations that were so essential to be able to allow people to have an ending that really valued their personal goals and values, that those conversations weren’t taking place, certainly weren’t happening in the ICU and weren’t happening upstream, when they should happen, which is months or years ahead of an acute crisis,” Ungerleider said to me during our Zoom interview.
She continued, “Death is something that we all inevitably live through, certainly for the people we love and then for ourselves. So what we’re trying to do is bring these conversations, you know, into the open.”
End Well’s fresh perspective and commitment to infusing hope into challenging conversations led to over 30 million social media impressions through free virtual events and their in-person and virtual summit. This year’s annual summit, held on November 20th, with the theme “Radical Bravery,” brought together leading voices from across industries to discuss end-of-life transformation.
“The summit isn’t like a medical conference. There certainly are doctors, nurses, social workers, and chaplains in the audience. Still, there are caregivers and artists and folks from the tech community and spiritual leaders and people who have either lived through this experience for themselves. Hence, they’re there to try to make a difference, but really, people who want to reflect on what matters most, on living as well as we can. Conversations about the end of life, when done well, are really life-affirming. Death can be a teacher to all of us and encourage us,” Ungerleider shared.
At End Well’s 2025 summit, they covered topics such as grief, dementia caregiving, closing the global pain divide, and how death is highlighted in pop culture. To help lead these critical conversations, Ungerleider and her team brought on health care professionals, caretaking experts, and notable actresses Nikki Boyer, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Tembi Locke, who’ve all had unique experiences with caretaking and death.
During our interview, End Well speaker and former host of the summit, Brown, discussed the importance of advocating for caregiving by sharing her personal experience caring for her father with dementia. She emphasized the need for open discussions about caregiving to combat feelings of isolation among caregivers. Brown highlighted the challenges of balancing caregiving with career, the emotional toll, and the necessity of self-care. “What I know for sure is that before we leave here, each of us will be a caregiver or caregiving. So, for me, it’s important to talk about my experience so that, when it’s their turn, people have some information. Because I had very little, I just kind of jumped into the deep end and hoped for the best,” she told me during our interview.
Brown also reflected on the societal taboo around end-of-life discussions and the value of conferences like the End Well Summit in preparing individuals for these realities. She underscores the importance of living vibrantly and planning for the end of life to ensure a fulfilling final chapter. “Caretaking and death aren’t issues, but this is a human condition. This is a human experience, and we are all going to experience it. But unfortunately, it feels like it’s so taboo to even talk about,” Brown stated.
Brown and Emma Heming Willis, wife of Bruce Willis, and fellow caretaker spoke on “The Unfiltered Truth: Living and Loving Through Dementia,” as both of their loved ones are battling the condition. Willis shared on the panel how helpful the connection has been for her while caretaking for her partner. Today, this is feeding my soul. Connection. It’s been a lifeline for me. I was isolated for so long, and I feel like community has been everything. It doesn’t make the burden any less, but it lightens the load a little bit. When you can sit across from someone else whom you’ve never met before and feel seen, feel connected, there is some real meaning in that. We spend our lives so disconnected,” she said.
During the “Death Goes Prime Time” panel, Ungerleider shared, “For so long, death was the storyline that we skipped, the episode that we turned off, the dinner table topic that made everyone suddenly change the subject. But something’s shifting, stories about illness, loss, care, and connection are showing up with humor and heart and real humanity.”
Boyer, executive producer of the popular FX show “Dying for Sex,” was also part of the panel along with Locke. “So often in the world, we use television as a mirror. Television has been responsible for changing the way people view the world, changing the way people talk about things,” she said to me in an interview ahead of the conference. “I remember when I was watching the TV show “From Scratch,” and seeing the scene when the palliative care doctor comes in, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that on television,’ and that is something that happens every single day to people. We’ve seen the cancer diagnosis, but what about the communicative moments around this?”
Tembi Locke, actress and author of the bestselling memoir, “From Scratch,” which was later adapted into a limited TV series by Netflix, shares, “When I wrote my book and was a part of the team adapting it. I understood the power of the medium. I understood what it meant to have, in the case of Netflix, a global canvas upon which to both share a story and reflect back to us as humans. Grief is the most basic human experience. It is central to the arc of our human life, and we will all experience some grief. And so to exclude that, or to shy away from that in narrative storytelling and television, to me, does us a disservice.”
Locke believes that grief can be incredibly unifying, especially when discussing its ebbs and flows among others who understand through lived experience. “The hope that is within ‘From Scratch,’ our desire, was that people would see it as a path, perhaps some part of a roadmap for how they might, as individuals or as a family or even as a community, navigate grief. It’s not a solo experience. Grief is a shared experience. It has its singularity, but we heal and we’re able to navigate it when we do it in community, and to model that on television felt like one of the highest and best uses of the form,” she states. “I think what End Well is doing beautifully, is amplifying, mirroring back to us our shared need to be in community in our most vulnerable times.”