299: Viewing Death Through the Eyes of a Hospice Nurse with Liz Keller

Liz Keller is a registered nurse with 25 years of experience. She has practiced in all specialties from birth through end of life. Her true passion lies in hospice care where she acts as a midwife on the journey for those transitioning out of the earthly world (at the end of their lives). Her goal is to eliminate the stigma around hospice care. She hopes to be part of the movement to start the conversation about having an end of life plan with the focus being on hospice care. She believes that empowering people to make choices about how they want their last days to look is very empowering. This should be done while they are still in good health and is the key to facilitating a good death. She lives in Milwaukee Wisconsin with her husband, three children, and chocolate lab Leo! She loves the lake and spending every possible minute outside during Wisconsin summers!! >>> Connect with Betsy on IG @betsypake TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the Art of Living big podcast. My name is Betsy pake. I’m an author, a speaker, and a trainer of NLP and hypnotherapy. And I’m focused on helping you understand and design your life with the power of the subconscious. This podcast is designed to help you think differently about what could be possible for your life. Now, let’s go live big. Hello, everyone, welcome fellow adventurers, welcome to the show today, I have, I actually have a really good friend of mine on today. And this conversation I think, is going to be fascinating. I’m super excited. And I’m super excited, she agreed to come on and talk to me because I think I had to convince her a little bit. But Liz Keller is on she is a registered nurse, she’s got 25 years experience in the nursing profession. And she’s practiced in all specialties from birth, all the way to the end of life, which is where I’m going with this. So her real passion lies in hospice care where she acts as a midwife on the journey to those transitioning out of this earthly world at the end of their lives. So her goal is to really eliminate the stigma around hospice care. So we’re going to dive into all of that into talking about death into what happens into like, the actual, like, physical side of like, what she sees and how she experiences death in different instances. So thank you so much for agreeing to come on, Liz. Thank you, Betsy. I’m very excited to be here with you talking about something that I think a lot of people would never choose to talk about, you know, why? Why is it that we’re so afraid to talk about death? I wish I knew, I think a lot of is cultural. Because I know that I’ve experienced in working with some other cultures that there’s a special reference to it. But I think in the American culture, overall, people, there’s just a lot of fear. And when you think about the way things that we don’t know, or that are unknown to us, can create fear. So yeah, it’s surprising, but I’m kind of on a mission to, you know, eliminate that and do what I can through my work. Yeah. And help people not be so afraid. Yeah. Well, I love that maybe my work could help expand your work. And we could do this together today. As we co create, we co create. So okay, so, you know, it’s interesting, because I remember when my grandmother died, she, she wasn’t in hospice, but she was in the hospital, like, we knew she was going to die. And she and I had talked off and on about death, I think part of her wanted to talk about death when my mom died, but part of her was afraid to talk about it. But we talked a lot about having signs and that she would send me signs. And we agreed, although she sort of like laughingly agreed that she would send me certain signs,