I’m Sue Dyer and I have been enjoying these conversations for thirty years and I invite you to join me.
  It is my mission and life purpose to facilitate discussions on death and dying, to increase our awareness of how our beliefs shape our views on death, dying, and living, and to teach the skills to engage in this dialogue. The result — to live more aware, more liberated, more purposefully and more joyously. To LIVE with less fear of the transition that we are all going to experience.

I am an educator, a speaker, a coach, a mentor, and your dialogue partner if you would like one. The world loves titles. I’m not a fan. I’ve spent an entire teaching career encouraging people to shed their titles and look at who they really are. But if I’ve got to pick titles then I pick the ones mentioned above and just one other —- an Amicus Mortis, a friend in death.

I began teaching in 1989 during my graduate studies at the University of Washington. I taught courses in Interpersonal Communication emphasizing how the quality of our contact with others so dramatically impacts the quality of our lives. In 1992 after the completion of my Master’s Degree, I opened an education and consulting practice presenting many of the same concepts to large and small professional groups.

Also, in 1992 I started volunteering on Mondays at Seattle Children’s Hospital. On the first Monday, some wonderful soul determined that I should be assigned to the hematology/oncology unit. Having spent the past eleven years on campus, I was really missing the constant challenge of stretching my mind through deep philosophical discussions and was seeking new mentors. Who knew I would find them in the hematology/oncology unit. They showed up in the form of beautiful, often bald, young souls many of whom were facing death. Mondays became my favorite day of the week.

During the week in the professional world I was playing the role of educator, executive coach, and facilitator, leading people to heighten their awareness of themselves as communicators and teaching a skill set to improve the quality of their relationships. On Mondays, I was immersed in the most exquisite and delicious conversations, heightening my own awareness. Many of these young children openly and honestly talked about death and dying with an ease and an innocence that moved me to my core. Volunteers of course had parameters and rules to abide by. “No talking about religion or religious beliefs, no taking about cancer, no talking about death.” For me those rules took all of the life out of dying as well as the possibility for rich, intimate dialogue. So I listened and I talked and I learned. Those were clarifying and defining moments in my life that inspired the direction of my teaching. I invested considerable time and effort reaching out to parent groups and medical professionals with a goal of implementing interpersonal communication classes that focused on talking about death and dying. These ideas and proposals were met with great resistance. I believe the conversations were extremely difficult for parents; and for medical professionals the acknowledgement and discussion of death appeared to translate to some kind of failure on their part. The need was clear. It was then and it is now, time to engage in the most important conversation of our lives. It is a dialogue for anyone who thinks they will ever die.