What the dying can teach us about living well: lessons on life and reflections on mortality | BJ Miller, M.D. and Bridget Sumser, L.C.S.W.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guests this week are Dr. BJ Miller and Bridget Sumser. BJ is a hospice and palliative care physician with expertise in serious illness, end-of-life issues and death. He is the co-founder and president of METAL Health, an organization providing support to patients and families living with illnesses, and he was a previous guest on the drive all the way back in November of 2020 Bridget is a licensed social worker who specializes in helping people with serious illnesses, promoting connection and well-being, and working with patients and their families during end-of-life periods. In addition to her private practice, she is a provider at METAL Health and the Palliative Care Program for Adults at UCSF. I wanted to have BJ and Bridget on to have a conversation to explore the insights gained from working with people at the end of their lives. What do they reflect on? What do they find most important? What I really wanted to understand here was, what can the dying teach the living? In this episode, we discuss the physiological and emotional processes of dying. What happens as the body shuts down and how families interpret those changes? Why are cultural aversion to discussing death leads to unnecessary suffering and how acknowledging mortality earlier in life can be empowering? The differences between palliative care and hospice and how our healthcare system often delays comfort-focused care until it's too late. What suffering really means, how it's not just physical pain, but a threat to one's identity and reality. The importance of honesty and emotional courage at the end of life and how dying can bring profound emotional, spiritual, and relational clarity. Insights from decades of working with people who were encountering their death, what patients regret, how they grow, and what really matters in the end. We talk about this idea of how people die the way they lived and why cultivating emotional, spiritual, and relational awareness while we are alive shapes how we die probably more than anything else. We talk about the role of forgiveness, acceptance, and connection in dying as well, especially self-forgiveness and the ability to be with what we can't control. Ultimately, we talk about what the dying can teach the living, not just in terms of how to die, but perhaps more importantly in terms of how to live. Without further delay, please enjoy this discussion with BJ Miller and Bridget Sumser.
BJ, amazing to have you back again, and Bridget, great to meet you for the first time. Thank you guys both for coming out here. BJ, you and I go way back. You're a previous guest on the podcast, and we've spoken a little bit about some of the topics we're going to get to today. But when I reached out to you a few months ago to talk about this idea, you immediately suggested bringing Bridget along. So, let me just share with folks what I wanted to talk about, and I would love for you to share why you felt that this would be a great three-person discussion as opposed to a two-person. I reached out to you and I said, look, I want to understand more about living, and I have an idea that we could learn a lot from people who are dying. And people who listen to this podcast know that I think that quality of life matters as much and potentially more than length of life. And a big part of that probably comes down to things that people think about during their life and during the end of their life, and maybe that there are regrets that people have, that only surface at the end of life. So anyway, I kind of ran this idea by you. Actually, I think I ran the idea by you as, do you even know anybody that would have thoughts on this? And you said, I'd love to talk about it. And so-