The Last Ecstatic Days: A Conversation About Community Care

Aditi Sethi, MD – founder of the Center for Conscious Living and Dying (CCLD) – and Hannah Fowler, RN – Director of Education at CCLD – lead a conversation on communal caregiving at the bedside. Aditi and Hannah – both end-of-life doulas – will also share a work-in-progress sneak peek of the documentary The Last Ecstatic Days to be released in 2023. Aditi is featured in the film and Hannah is the film's impact producer. This is event is co-hosted with The Completed Life Initiative.

At the height of the pandemic a young man named Ethan Sisser sat alone in his hospital room. Afflicted with brain cancer, he began documenting his agonizing journey on social media. Around the globe thousands of people celebrated Ethan’s unflinching courage, charismatic vitality and empowering ruminations, but he envisioned more - to make a movie about the ineffable beauty of leaving the body. Inspired by Ethan, a devoted team of death workers that included Aditi Sethi, transported him to a quiet house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. What unfolded in Ethan’s final weeks is an intimate story that has never been told before: how a community came together to help a dying man find healing through release.

Hannah Fowler, RN

Hannah Fowler is a hospice nurse, end-of-life doula, facilitator and educator who brings conscious living and dying practices to individuals and organizations around the world. She is the Director of Education & Engagement for the Center of Conscious Living and Dying in Asheville, North Carolina and faculty with the Conscious Dying Institute, and serves on the advisory board of the Completed Life Initiative. Hannah has presented for the Centre for Death and Society, Redesigning Deathcare and the National End of Life Doula Alliance, and has been featured on podcasts including the Best Life Best Death. Through trainings, workshops, and grief rituals, Hannah teaches how awareness of death goes beyond honoring our last act of living and allows us to open to the mystery of life itself. Prior to deathcare work, Hannah was the Director of the Intensive Outpatient Psychotherapy Unit at the Lower Keys Medical Center and an ICU step-down nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Hannah is certified in energetic trauma release and healing touch.

Aditi Sethi, MD

Aditi Sethi is a hospice and palliative care physician, end of life doula, musician and executive director of the Center for Conscious Living & Dying, Inc. Aditi is an emerging and important voice for shifting our culture’s understanding and approach to dying, death, and bereavement care.