Amanda Bennett and her husband were passionate and full of life all throughout their lives together — and up until the final days, too. Bennett gives a sweet yet powerful talk on why, for the loved ones of the dying, having hope for a happy ending shouldn’t warrant a diagnosis of “denial.” She calls for a more heroic narrative for death — to match the ones we have in life.
”So I’d like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in China, the night I met my husband. It was a city so long ago that it was still called Peking.”
”So we fought, we struggled, we triumphed. It was an exhilarating fight, and I’d repeat the fight todaywithout a moment’s hesitation. We fought together, we lived together. It turned what could have beenseven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious. It was also an expensive fight. It was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care, and of healthcare for all of us.”
Amanda Bennett – bio
In “The Cost of Hope,” Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Amanda Bennett brings an investigative angle to the conversation about end-of-life care.
Amanda Bennett is the Executive Editor of Projects and Investigations for Bloomberg News. Previously she served for three years as the Managing Editor of projects for The Oregonian in Portland and was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for more than 20 years.
In 1997 Bennett shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a Wall Street Journalinvestigation on the struggle against AIDS, and in 2001 received a second Pulitzer Prize, for public service, as the lead of a team at The Oregonian. In 2010 Bennett was elected as co-Chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Bennett has written six books. Her most recent book, The Cost of Hope, is part-memoir, part-investigative report, about her seven-year struggle within the American healthcare system to save her husband from cancer.
“[The Cost of Hope] illuminates the conundrum Americans face over the high cost of care—the fact that we will do almost anything to keep our loved ones alive because we can’t bear to let them go.” — The Wall Street Journal
Source: ted.com
Author: Amanda Bennett