What the Dying Can Teach the Living and Why Most of Us Miss It
Rose Sexton is an end-of-life doula, nurse, mother, performer, mover of mountains, and author based in Victoria, Australia. Throughout a nursing career spanning more than four decades, she has been drawn to those facing life's biggest transitions, supporting people in this sacred space. She has recently published her dual-voice memoir "The Bird and the Bee" (Balboa Press, October 2026).
People who are dying have access to a clarity most of us spend a lifetime avoiding. As a palliative care nurse and death doula, I've watched what happens when someone leans into that clarity, and what it costs when they can't. This is the story of one man who did it better than anyone I've ever known.
Bill: Not interested in your pity
“I'm not interested in your pity."
I have had melanoma twice. The first time, I came home from hospital after a full lymph node clearance with drain tubes still in me, to an empty house, and people who had no idea what to do with me. I survived it. By what mechanism, I am not entirely sure, perhaps sheer bloody-mindedness. Either way, I made it out the other side and spent the better part of a decade convinced I had outrun it.
I hadn't. But that is not the point. I have been living with an awareness of my own mortality since I was a young man. What I have come to understand is that most people deal with this in one of two ways. They either reject death outright, won't hear of it, or treat it like a rumour about someone else's life. Or they cling so hard to living that fear ends up running the whole show. Both, in my view, are a recipe for suffering.
There is a third way. You hold both. Life and death, right there in the room together, without flinching from either one.
The Billy experience
I am a guitarist, a yoga teacher, a philosopher of sorts, though I'd never use that word in polite company. I’ve spent years studying non-attachment, teaching it, and applying it with varying degrees of success to my own completely contradictory personality.
When the melanoma I’d dealt with in 2009 came back, and I found myself in the outpatient waiting area at the Cancer Centre in Melbourne, I knew I had to once again turn on the Billy experience with my new doctor. I have always had a philosophy about people who hold power over your life: make them remember you. Be human to human, not problem to solution. So I crack a few jokes. Correct her on something. I make sure that when she is sitting in her office later, making decisions, she’s making them about me, a person she has actually met, and not about the paperwork with my name on it.”
Rose: What 40 years taught me
I'm a palliative care nurse and an End-of-Life Doula. I have sat with a lot of dying people. Some of them carry a quality: a clarity, a stripped-back honesty about what actually matters, that most of us rarely manage to access. They've just run out of steam for pretending.
The pretending takes up more energy than you'd think. Pretending we have more time than we do. That the people we love know we love them, without us actually saying so. The dying tend to stop pretending fairly quickly, and what's left is often something quite beautiful.
Bill lost the ability to play guitar, then lost the ability to walk to the bathroom on his own. This was quickly followed by the loss of the ability to communicate clearly, a devastating blow. Each loss arrived, and he absorbed it. There was grief, of course. But no bitterness, no railing against it. He said yes to life all the way through, and then when the only logical thing left to do was turn and face his death, he said yes to that too.
People die the way they live
Here is something they don't teach you in nursing school, but that four decades at the bedside will show you without fail. People die the way they live.
The person who spent their whole life avoiding difficult conversations will avoid them right to the end. The stubborn one stays stubborn. The generous one finds ways to keep giving even when there is almost nothing left. Character doesn't transform because death arrives. If anything, it distils.
I have sat with people who could not and would not look at what was coming. Who kept accepting treatment after treatment, not because there was genuine hope, but because entertaining the alternative was simply not possible for them. Who never got to do any of the things you can only do when you know your time is short. The conversations. The goodbyes. The chance to tell the people you love what they actually mean to you.
I watched this with another dear friend. She wouldn't let us talk about it. And in not talking about it, we lost things we can never get back. But as I’ve learned, people die the way they live, and she was herself, right to the end. But I saw what it cost her, and what it cost us, the ones who loved her. Her silence was its own kind of grief, happening before she was even gone.
We're all in the same boat
The dying are not a separate category of person. They are living, right up until they are not. The dying are doing the most concentrated, most present version of the living any of us ever manage.
A few years ago, I was told about a man, fit, healthy, happily getting on with his life, who had a massive heart attack just before Christmas and died on the spot. We look at the people who are visibly dying and use them as a kind of human shield. “As long as she's ahead of me on the conveyor belt, the wrecking ball isn't headed my way.” But the wrecking ball doesn't care about the queue.
You are going to die. So am I. So is every single person reading this. The question is whether we'll let that knowledge sit in the room with us or keep pretending it only applies to other people.
Bill didn't leave a manual. Just the example of someone who decided to live whatever time was left in full, without the pretending.
That's what the dying can teach the living. And the living, if we're paying any attention, don't even have to wait until we're dying to learn it.
This is the second in a series of articles drawn from my memoir The Bird and Bee (Balboa Press, 2026). Read the first article here.
If this resonated, the book goes much deeper. Order The Bird and Bee here.
Read more from Rose Sexton
Rose Sexton, End-of-Life Doula, Registered Nurse & Author
Rose Sexton is a palliative care nurse, end-of-life doula, and author based in Victoria, Australia. Throughout a nursing career spanning more than forty years, she has been drawn to those facing life's biggest transitions. The Bird and Bee (Balboa Press, October 2026) is her debut memoir, a dual-voice account of walking with her soulmate Bill, guitarist and philosopher, through his final journey.
