“listen to people in their 80's. They have looked across the street at death for a decade. They know what's vital.”
— Advice from Patricia Lyons Simon Newman, 84 years old, the day before she died, shared on Twitter by her son, journalist Scott Simon

Here at The Action Mill we started Death & Design as our contribution to a nascent movement to unhide death and the dying process, to open up difficult conversations.

One of our first blog entries was about Martha Keochareon, a nurse from South Hadley, Massachusetts with pancreatic cancer, who invited nursing students into her home to ask her questions and learn first hand about caring for someone at the end of their life.

Now Scott Simon, host of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday, has opened the door even wider by using Twitter to share his and his mother’s observations with 1.2 million followers during the final days of her life. To read some of the tweets and learn more visit this link. Whether you find the use of Twitter for this purpose moving or profane, Ms. Newman’s wise instruction to “listen to people in their 80’s” is an open-ended invitation to face our own mortality.