Talking about death and dying

Talking about death is not easy for most people. But sharing what is important about what you want and what will happen can help everyone feel more comfortable.

Being able to talk about death will make it easy to understand and to discuss care at the end of life.

Communicating with older people

Communication becomes very important in planning and managing changes when someone is approaching the end of their life. It is important that the older person can talk to their family and friends about their care needs and their preferences and also talk about any personal matters that they wish to review or discuss.

Good communication between the older person and the people providing their care is also important. However, people can find it difficult to talk about dying.

There are a number of strategies that may be helpful:

  • Allow them to introduce the topic. 'How are you feeling about things? Is there anything you want to share with us?'
  • It may be easier to have a number of small conversations rather than one long conversation that tries to deal with many different topics.
  • Acknowledge the difficulty in talking about death and dying. 'I know talking about these things is never easy.'
  • Don't fill the silence. Allow them the time to say what is important.
  • Listen to the other person, and show you are listening, for example by nodding your head.
  • Respect what they are saying. You may want to know what to do about the funeral but they feel it is more important to talk about who will tell their friends.

Helpful resources

Being prepared

Remember family and friends  may have worries and concerns as well.

For children it can help them understand what is happening and be able to share important stories and memories. Being able to talk about the future means we have time to seek information. Knowledge and ability to ask questions means that we can support people providing care and people needing care. 

Conversations also give the opportunity to organise practical things like wills, funerals and preferences about life support machines and organ donation. It can help us be prepared for the realities of dying and to make sure that we can help the person’s preferences for care at the end of life are realised.

The Age UK website has resources available to help start difficult end of life conversations.

Resources include Let's talk about death and dying video and a booklet that can be downloaded (1.16MB pdf) and printed to be read later.

AgeUK Let's talk about death and dying resource

AgeUK's information about having difficult conversations about death and dying

AgeUK's information about having difficult conversations

This information was drawn from the following resources:

Last updated 08 November 2024