To Know Ends: Honest conversations about aging, illness, and dying well

For the finale of this season, we flipped the show. Instead of the experts, an open call: millennials and Gen-Z, anywhere, answering questions about aging, caregiving, and grief — no names, just a voice memo, an age, and a place they call home.Five strangers answered. A 36-year-old confronting the mirror. A 20-year-old who learned the difference between seeing death and standing near it. A 34-year-old who has held the hands of dying strangers. A 34-year old caregiver who nursed the woman who raised her. And a 42-year-old who met death twice, twenty years apart — and came back with different answers each time.What they have in common, they found on their own: aging is a privilege, and the questions we avoid get lighter every time we say them out loud.What do you want your aging to look like — and what scares you about it? Sit with it. We'll be back soon.

Emily Jacobs went to nursing school because of the months she spent caring for her boyfriend after a routine surgery went wrong. She was twenty-four, had a degree in journalism, and had never done anything like it. What stayed with her was not the wound care. It was standing in a hospital room with no idea how to help.Twenty years later she is a hospice nurse with ten years of emergency medicine behind her and a master's degree in medical cannabis from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, a degree she pursued after her own rheumatologist refused to keep treating her when she became a legal medical patient.In this episode, Emily and Chance talk about the medicines people are afraid of and what that fear costs a family at the end of a life. Why she describes cannabis as leveling rather than getting high. Why the stigma around it was built on racial and political history rather than pharmacology. And why the same conversation she once had to fight to have about her own body is the one she now walks into living rooms to have about morphine, usually with people who are certain it means the end.Her invitation to anyone facing this: you do not have to have it figured out first. Come messy, and we will figure it out together.Emily Jacobs, RN, is a registered nurse with Hospice of the Chesapeake.To Know Ends is presented by Chesapeake Health Partners in partnership with Hospice of the Chesapeake.

Perry Platt was an EMT, then an ICU nurse, then a travel nurse, and none of it fit. She kept moving until she found the one place her puzzle piece finally clicked into place: hospice. Perry is a Hospice Inpatient Center Clinical Manager and nurse at Hospice of the Chesapeake, and she is thirty years old, in a field most people picture as older. That vantage point changes everything she sees. In this episode she takes on the words that scare people before anyone explains them, hospice and morphine, and shows what they actually mean. She walks through the gap between what hospice offers and what people take, the difference between giving up and choosing your goals, and why comfort is not the same as surrender. And she makes a case aimed squarely at her own generation: that the best time to decide how you want to be cared for is now, on an ordinary afternoon, while you still have every wit about you to do it right.This one is for anyone who has ever flinched at the word hospice, anyone who has been putting off a conversation they know is coming, and anyone who assumes this is a subject for later. Perry's answer is that later is a choice too, and not always the one you would make for yourself. There is beauty in the hard moments, she says, and there is real power in choice. The question is only whether you want to come to a slow stop, or an abrupt halt.

Some people spend their whole lives holding everyone else together. Jennifer Ward's work begins the moment they finally set that weight down.A licensed social worker and bereavement counselor, Jennifer came to this work through the loss of her grandmother, the matriarch of a family of fifteen. She sits down with host Chance for an honest conversation about grief, faith, and why the hardest conversations about aging and the end of life are so often the ones we never have, especially in the Black community.Together they get into the fear that keeps families from asking for help, the silence around mental health, the grief that arrives long before a loss, and what changes when we lead with life instead of leading with the word hospice. Jennifer's invitation is a simple one: you can take the cape off here.For anyone who has ever had to be the strong one. This is a place to put it down.

Alena Dailey spent 15 years working in senior living, watching hospice teams care for residents and their families from the outside. She understood the landscape. She knew the language. She thought she was ready.Then, at 29, she became her grandmother's primary evening caregiver. And everything she thought she knew fell away.What followed was a year and a half on hospice that Alena now calls the best out of the last five years of her life. Not because the dying stopped, but because the rushing did. Because a layer of support arrived that let her be more than just a caregiver. It let her be a granddaughter again.In this episode, Alena teaches us about healing touch—not as a technique, but as a choice to be fully present with another person. She talks about the moment her grandmother asked her to rub lotion on her feet, and why that small act of presence mattered more than any task on a checklist. She talks about what you'll actually miss when someone is gone. And she talks about what it takes to separate the role of caregiver from the person you are, so that neither one consumes you.Episode 2 of To Know Ends is for anyone currently caring for a loved one, or anyone who will be.It's a reminder that healing happens not through doing everything right, but through being present with what is.

Before Victoria Ivicek ever answered the phone for a grieving family, she was one of them. When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Victoria watched his decline unfold faster than anyone expected. Hospice of the Chesapeake came into their home during those final six months — and what she witnessed in that time didn't look anything like what she thought hospice was. There was comfort. There was presence. There was a kind of care that didn't feel like giving up. It felt, in her words, like the opposite. That experience brought her to the other side of the phone. Today, Victoria works as part of the clinical support team at Hospice of the Chesapeake, and she carries her father's story into every conversation she has with families navigating the same uncertainty she once felt. Episode 1 of To Know Ends is for anyone who has ever feared the word hospice. By the end, you might not anymore.