What if birth is the end and death is the beginning?

Last week on The Aftershocks of After Loss, I hosted Kimberly Paul of Death By Design. From the set of Saturday Night Live in New York City, to casting for CBS daytime, Kimberly has spent the last 17 years telling a very different kind of story. After nearly 20 years working in hospice, becoming a speaker about end of life, death, and dying, was a natural transition for her.

In 2015, she wowed audiences with her TedX Talk, “Who’s That?” and challenged people to stop ignoring the elephant in the room. She even brought a giant 8-foot blow-up elephant named “Eddie” on stage with her.

Kimberly hosts the podcast “Death By Design” and wrote the book Bridging the Gap, where she shares personal stories and the life lessons from her hospice career. After the book was published in 2018, Kimberly embarked on the cross-country “Live Well Die Well Tour” to radically change the way people face end-of-life.

In our IG Live, Kimberly and I talked about how we die will ultimately impact how individuals grieve us. And after our talk, I can’t get one of her hypothetical questions out of my mind: What if birth is the end and death is the beginning?