A week before the third SA Death Festival at Centennial Park, Steve sits down with India Wallace and Catherine Ooi to ask what we’re really afraid of: being dead, or the business of dying? The answer reaches from a hospice companion who helped a woman set down a lifelong secret to the surprising power of a family saying, “You can leave. We’ll be okay.”

There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode.

The Musical Pilgrimage is a world premiere: “Cowards of Us All” by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, inspired by Andrew Scott’s Almeida Theatre take on Hamlet’s soliloquy, a diagnosis that arrives out of the blue, and a moth that made it outside, if only briefly.

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Running Sheet: SA Death Festival The Key To Living Well

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

No SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:03:28 Catherine Ooi and India Wallace

Steve opens with Andrew Scott’s 2017 Hamlet for Almeida Theatre, then makes a confession. A few years ago he fainted in the middle of the night, hit his head hard enough to need stitches, and remembers only what he calls “perfect nothingness”, a strangely unfelt bliss. Set that beside Dante’s circles of hell, which he’s reading at the moment, and his question becomes sharp: is our fear about being dead, or about dying?

Catherine Ooi chairs Pure Land Home Hospice, works on Malaysia’s national palliative care standards and is researching death anxiety for her PhD. She delivers a humbling finding: the field has no agreed definition of the fear it studies. Two people with identical diagnoses can have wildly different experiences of it. Her argument for a festival is that death touches everything, from existential questions to money, burial choices and relationships. Festivals, she says, exist for people to ask the right questions rather than receive neat answers.

India Wallace co-founded the hospice and organises the festival. Her hospice “companions”, who are “not friends, but they’re friendly”, can hear what family members often can’t. One woman carried a massive secret for decades, and after confiding in her companion she felt lighter and went on to have what India calls a beautiful death. India also tells a personal story. Her sister, a committed atheist, became curious about Buddhism and began attending Theosophical Society talks after her husband died. India herself practises a daily exercise in impermanence on her farm driveway: that house won’t be there, that cow won’t be there, and neither will she.

Steve brings in Camus, Ecclesiastes, Bronnie Ware’s regrets of the dying, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (his pick for the finest title in fiction), and a tangent about the farmer whose world Napoleon upends. Catherine seizes on the farmer. A diagnosis is the same earthquake, and the hospice response is “I’m here with you” rather than a script of answers. A man who loses his legs may find a new normal, and for someone near the end that might simply be a flower that bloomed in the garden today.

The conversation turns to what people reach for at the end. India names forgiveness, including a Daw Park Hospice role-play that helped two sisters finally talk. Catherine’s most surprising observation is permission. Sometimes a dying person holds on because they can’t leave a family in fear and grief, until someone tells them they will be okay. She also gently refutes the idea that fear means a lack of acceptance: acceptance, she says, isn’t the absence of fear. They also cover death doulas (unregulated, so “buyer beware”), death literacy, and why more people would die at home if they felt supported.

Finally, the festival itself. Between them they recommend Catherine’s death anxiety session, the impermanence meditation, the Pure Land Home Hospice session on dying at home, creative activities, a Peter Goldsworthy talk, and a community picnic extended to 90 minutes this year. The Advance Care Planning workshop is booked out, so book early next year.

The SA Death Festival

01:13:10 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Cowards Of Us All by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos.

Steve had started a song in anticipation of this interview, but the conversation fed into his psyche and produced something else. It draws on Andrew Scott’s performance of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the “undiscovered country” and a line about conscience making cowards of us all. It also carries Catherine’s point that a diagnosis can be your own Napoleon, and a moth that his daughter freed from the house, only for a bird to complete another circle of life. Steve also issues a call-out: if you’re a performer who’d like to take these lyrics under your wing, get in touch via stevedavis.com.au, where the longhand lyrics and scribbled notes live.