BJ Miller

Five Things I've Learned About

Living and Dying During the Pandemic

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Join hospice and palliative care specialist Dr. BJ Miller, and discover the Five Things He’s Learned anew about living and preparing for death after this year of shared loss, challenge, and renewal.

Online Event Details

  • 120 minutes

Price

  • Single-Class Ticket - $60.00

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about living meaningfully with death after our year of challenge and loss.


As I wrote in a recent year-ending editorial in the New York Times, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has done more than awaken us to the fact that we die. This personal, global disaster challenges us to honor the passing of others and to activate the role we each have in facing our own mortality. The shared loss and pain we’ve each experienced in the last year makes it harder than ever to follow our first impulses, simply to turn away from death. Covid-19 demands that we fold the prospect of death meaningfully into our lives.

As a hospice and palliative medicine physician and founder of Mettle Health, I devote my professional life to consulting and supporting patients and caregivers navigating serious illness. Now, in this online class, I’ll share the five essential lessons I’ve learned while helping others navigate serious health challenges for themselves or for someone they love. More than that, I’ll try as best I can to contextualize the essential things that have become even clearer to me over the course of the pandemic.

Some of what I’ll share I’ve been thinking about for a long time: For example, how my own experiences have shaped how I’ve come to think about death. I’ll also share the key themes of my book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End, Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death— which offers strategies for planning ahead, dealing with illness, getting help along the way, preparing for when death is close, and the practical matters that come after death.

But what I really hope to focus on is what I’ve learned even more clearly about living and dying since last March, when the pandemic began. I’ll explain how living in the face of illness can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation; how loss can be the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks; and how I’ve often seen that reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives.

I’ve come to see that the invisible threat we’ve been forced to face during the pandemic offers us a unique moment to look at the big picture of life I believe that the things I’ve learned might offer something of a mission statement for some ambitious and practical changes, ideas that can lead to something better for ourselves and for the people we’re connected to. I’d very much like to share these possibilities with you and to hear what you’re thinking and feeling.

I hope you will join me.

BJ Miller

Dr. BJ Miller is a longtime hospice and palliative medicine physician and educator. He currently sees patients and families via telehealth through Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the practical, emotional and existential issues that come with serious illness and disability.

BJ’s been on faculty at his alma mater, UCSF, since 2007 and has worked in all settings of care: hospital, clinic, residential facility, and home. Led by his own experiences as a patient, BJ advocates for the roles of our senses, community and presence in designing a better ending. His interests are in working across disciplines to affect broad-based culture change, cultivating a civic model for aging and dying and furthering the message that suffering, illness, and dying are fundamental and intrinsic aspects of life. His career has been dedicated to moving healthcare towards a human centered approach, on a policy as well as a personal level.

BJ has given over 100 talks nationally, and internationally, on the topics of death, dying, palliative care and the intersection of healthcare with design. His 2015 TED Talk: “Not Whether But How” (aka “What Matters Most at the End of Life”), has been viewed over 11 million times and his work has also been the subject of multiple interviews and podcasts, including Oprah Winfrey, PBS, The New York Times, The California Sunday Magazine, GOOP, Krista Tippett, Tim Ferriss and the TED Radio Hour.  His book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End, was co- authored with Shoshana Berger and published in 2019.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Your ticket entitles you to ongoing access to this class — even after the live session concludes.

If you purchase a ticket in time to join the class live, you can view the archive as soon as it’s posted, as often as you like. Look for an email with information about how to access the course archive within 48 hours of the end of the live class. Once you get it, you’ll have all the information you need to access it as you like across any and all devices you own.

If you purchase a ticket after the live class takes place, you can view the archive immediately, and you can return to it as frequently as you like

If you’d like a refund, we can happily credit the card you used to register for the session. Please send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com , and we’ll confirm receipt as soon as we see it (We don’t need your credit card info – just your email address and date of purchase.)

There are two things to know:

  • Unfortunately, we can only accept cancellations and refunds up to 48 hours before a scheduled session.
  • There is sure to be a lapse in time between the time we refund your order and the time a corresponding credit appears on your credit card statement. So that you’re not left waiting and wondering, we’ll contact you as soon as we’ve processed the credit in our system.

For reasons we hope you’ll understand – the biggest of them the fact that we make a point of compensating the folks who host Five Things I’ve Learned classes as quickly as we can – we can’t accommodate refunds for tickets purchased within 48 of the start of a scheduled live event. We can also accommodate refund requests for the purchase of an archived session only within 24 hours from the time of purchase.

If you’ve purchased a ticket for this online class and you find that for some reason you can’t make the live session, you have two choices:

  • The first: View the session archive. You can view the session archive as soon as it’s posted – or any time, as often as you like. We’ll make an archive of this class available within 48 hours of the live session, and we’ll send every ticket holder details on how they can view it. As a ticket holder, you’re able to view this full session archive any time– as often as you like.
  • The second: Request a refund. Just send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com, and we’ll help sort things out. Please keep in mind that we can only accommodate refund requests made more than 48 hours from the start of a live session.

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We’ll send another reminder on the day of the class itself, and we’ll be available online just before the class begins to make sure you have no problems joining when the time is right.

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