Barrie Littlefield: The Future of Dying

Barrie Littlefield started his career working for big pharmaceutical companies, he then worked with several communications consultancies and was involved in transformational change but Barrie’s main vocation was being a Dad and proud father of Eloise who died recently from a highly malignant brain tumour. Elouise was 10 years old and not afraid to die.

ABOUT TEDx

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, ‘ideas worth spreading’. The programme is designed to give communities, organisations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

ABOUT Barrie Littlefield

“Barrie Littlefield is a Communication Management and Business Improvement Consultant in Sydney, Australia. He counsels clients on reputation and change. His experiences cover the UK, Asia and of course Australia.

Barrie is an accomplished facilitator and leads strategic communication programmes encompassing internal change, crisis and issues management and strategic marketing.

In a conversation with a very compassionate Nurse, she matter-of-factly said, “You know Barrie, the problem with dying is that nobody wants to talk about it. It is such a taboo subject that nobody, it’s just not out there.”

He decided that at that point, someone had to talk about it, he had to talk about it. This TEDx talk gave him the opportunity to talk about ‘it’. Barrie says the only people that talk about death are comedians and shares a light-hearted slide of the epithet Aussie importee, Spike Milligan thought he’d love to have on his headstone.

Barrie’s father passed away from heart failure, his daughter suffered a particularly nasty form of malignant brain cancer. They died with six months of each other. What was unusual about their deaths, was that, both of them asked him to kill them. As a father and as a parent, seeing his loved one suffer is the worst thing he feels a person can do. Knowing it didn’t have to happen is even worse.”

If you liked this THEN you might also like: 1. Peter Saul: Dying in 21st Century Australia

The VIDEO