Episode · Stuff You Should Know · 2025-10-09
Books mentioned on Everyone Deserves A Good Death
The concept of hospice was created as a way to help people with only a few weeks to live spend their last days comfortable an surrounded by friends and family in the hope they can pass away peacefully. It’s kind of crazy hospice was ever a radical idea.
Josh Clark discussed On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Life After Death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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On Death and Dying
On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a foundational 1969 psychological text that introduced the five stages of grief and profoundly shaped the modern hospice movement.
Discussed“there was a psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kubler Ross who very famously came up with the five stages of grief. That was in her 1969 book on death and dying.”
Where to get it
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On Life After Death
On Life After Death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a foundational psychological text that explores the emotional stages of grief and the broader cultural conversation surrounding mortality.
Discussed“there was a psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kubler Ross who very famously came up with the five stages of grief. That was in her 1969 book on death and dying.”
Where to get it
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The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning philosophical and psychological study that argues human behavior is fundamentally driven by an unconscious terror of mortality and the subsequent cultural mechanisms created to deny it.
Discussed“I don't think we talked about the denial of death from 1973 uh but that was from an anthropologist named Ernest Becker and uh he was writing this as he was dying himself.”
Where to get it
