At a Loss - It’s life and death

Natasha Plunkett joins the podcast for a candid conversation about breast cancer, caregiving, grief, and the life that shifts after diagnosis. Working as a funeral director, she reflects on what it means to be surrounded by death professionally, then suddenly face her own diagnosis and the shock, clarity, and practical decisions that follow.

She speaks about the difficulty of moving from caregiver to someone needing care, the challenge of accepting vulnerability, and how past experiences of loss shape the way she processes her own illness.

A conversation about resilience, identity, friendship, and what it means to change without neatly “recovering” into who you were before.

Writer, poet, and filmmaker Kevin Toolis explores a way of understanding death that feels both ancient and immediate. Raised on a remote Irish island, he reflects on a culture where the dead are not hidden away, but kept close - Seen, touched, and shared in the company of the living.

Woven through are later experiences reporting from warzones, where death takes on a different kind of presence. At the centre is the Irish wake, offered not just as tradition, but as a guide. A way of meeting loss without distance.

What emerges moves between the philosophical and the practical, holding space for a quieter question: what changes when death is no longer something to turn away from, but something to be faced together.

When you meet Trish, what stands out isn’t heaviness — it’s energy. "The space of death is about people, he tangata, what’s more vibrant than people and the journey they are on?”. In this Episode Trish talks about developing a Death knowledge, breaking down the myths around hospice care, and why community connection matters so deeply. After nearly two decades in hospice care, her work is driven by a belief that caring for one another at the end of life is simply what we do.
 
A conversation about death that is, full of life.

How to die naturally.

Carol McAllum is the doctor you meet when recovery isn’t possible. She shares thoughts, wisdom and wonder in all she has learnt about life and death. Death can be messy, but it can also be natural, here’s how.

Do tell the children

Sarah’s kids know Mum works with the dead. Because she tells them her work stories. In her old job nursing the dying, she told them all about that too. Sarah says, please talk to kids about death. Here she tells you how.