Everything starts after overcoming the fear of death

Last time, we shared about our event planning bracelet, which is our prototype 3, and Popo’s visit to Death Cafe. After visiting Death Cafe, we learned something very fundamental, but crucial. With all of our research and interviews informing us that people are “afraid of death”, but we didn’t realize what that really meant.

The diagram above shows the journey of a patient’s end of life experience. Until now, we have created multiple prototypes that can solve some of the issues throughout this journey. However, even if we created something that tackles at solving any of the issues, it will most likely to not succeed. People would not use it unless they are open to share their inner thoughts.

The fear of death prevents people to take initiatives on improving their end of life experiences. We learnt that everything starts after overcoming the fear of death, but patients and loved ones have to accept the reality. The reality that the patient is dying and they do not have much time left. After acceptance of their health conditions they can and will truly share their end-of-life thoughts and wishes.

So, we created “Enduring Moments”, which is a set of tools that allow patients and loved ones to pass down their interests and knowledge and spend meaningful times together. However, the core of this is actually “hidden” from the users(patients and loved ones). The core of “Enduring Moments” is the process of creating an event and activity. The idea is that by planning events and spending time together, both patient and loved ones eventually understand patient’s health condition and realize that there isn’t much time left. As they continue to do these activities, people will eventually realize and accept the reality that death is not too far away. It can be ironic, but acceptance of dying actually ables people do over the fear of death.

This will be the first thing that patient and loved ones will see. It is an introduction of what we are trying to do.

After the introduction card, patient and loved ones will see a booklet that lets them to write down and think about interests and knowledge. This is to prime them to think and consider patient’s health condition.

After thinking and writing about interests and knowledge to pass down, they can actually do the event they created and planned and record the significant moment during the event and stick it to the fridge(behind, there is a magnet)

This is the example of what they can do. This will also be in the tool kit to show people how to use this.

We intended patient and loved ones use this tools after the very beginning of the journey that is shown above, because without overcoming the fear of death, people will naturally resist on even thinking about death, which is why there are so many issues with this current journey. Overcoming the fear of death is fundamental, but is the most important factor that will make the difference in people’s end of life experience.

This as far as we go for this semester. We learned so much from working on this project. Our intervention is just one step that people can take in order to have better end of life experience.