Dying With Dementia with P.K. Beville

What does it actually feel like to have dementia and what does it take to die well with it?

P.K. Beville has spent her career answering the first question. As the founder of Second Wind Dreams, a non-profit organization that fulfills dreams for older adults living in long-term care, and the creator of the Virtual Dementia Tour, P.K built a simulation that has put hundreds of thousands of people inside the experience of dementia, reshaping how caregivers, clinicians, and families understand the disease from the inside out.

But somewhere along the way, P.K. noticed a gap: all that hard-won empathy tended to stop short of the one moment that needed it most, the dying. So she created Empathetic Transitions, a dementia death doula training built on the belief that how we die with dementia matters, and that caregivers shouldn't have to walk into that room unprepared.

In this episode, we go into the places most people look away from:

• Why death with dementia is different from death with other diseases
• What "social death" looks like and why it often begins long before physical death
• The emotional and impossible choices around feeding at the end of life
• What a good death with dementia can actually look like

This is a conversation about fierce compassion, for the living and the dying alike.

Transcript

Second Wind Dreams

Daughterhood