Hospice Nurse Julie: Death is Nothing to Fear
She sits down with Rainn PLUS an excerpt from her new book
Soul Greetings to all you Ancestors-in-Training!
This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with the radiant and reassuring Julie McFadden—better known (of course) as Hospice Nurse Julie.
In her work as a hospice nurse, Julie has witnessed hundreds of final breaths and somehow emerged not with despair, but with wonder. In this conversation, they explore what dying actually looks like, how facing mortality can reshape the way we live, and why acceptance—not resistance—may be the key to a more meaningful life.
Julie’s The Office fandom aside, the through line of this conversation is the journey to death—our death and the deaths of everyone we love—which is fitting given the moniker “Hospice Nurse Julie.” Preparing for that journey—emotionally, spiritually, practically—is at the heart of Julie’s message. How can we find meaning and healing? How can we minimize unnecessary suffering? And is it even possible to find… joy?
At one point, Julie recalls hearing the voice of a patient at the exact moment he died—filled with awe, whispering as though soaring: “Oh my gosh… joy… if I only would have known.” That indescribable blend of wonder and release reminded Rainn of a line from the Bahá’í writings: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee; wherefore dost thou grieve?” He reflects on how hard it can be to find that joy in the midst of real grief. And yet, so many spiritual traditions describe the moment of death as the soul slipping free of its cage and into light. How could that not be a source of joy?
What becomes clear from their conversation—and even more clear from reading her book—is the scope of insight she has received from years of deep service and bearing witness. After personally witnessing hundreds of deaths, she arrived at a place where she no longer fears the process of dying. Through her work as a hospice nurse, she has seen moments that are amazing, beautiful, and even miraculous: dying people whose eyes fill with wonder as they speak of angels or music more beautiful than anything they’ve ever heard; faces that brighten into wide, luminous smiles in the moments just before death.
What moves her most, though, are the families—the love shared between patients and their loved ones as death approaches. Many people assume hospice work must be depressing or overwhelmingly sad, but Julie experiences it as the opposite. She sees so much love and considers it a profound privilege to serve another human being at such a vulnerable time. To her, the work is an incredible and sacred gift.
In her book, Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully, Julie writes that she “knew there had to be a better way to die” and asks a radical question: What if death isn’t the worst possible outcome? If we can normalize death, talk about it, and prepare for it, maybe we can suffer less—and live better—along the way.
As a companion to this week’s episode, we’re sharing an excerpt from Nothing to Fear—a deeper look at the wisdom, clarity, and unlikely hope Julie has found in her loving accompaniment of others at the end of life.
Embracing the Sacredness of Death
Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully
By Julie McFadden
I am asked all the time why in the world I would do something as difficult as working for hospice. People often ask, “Isn’t it so depressing?” It’s sad sometimes, yes. There’s really no way around that. But I don’t find my job to be depressing. In a way, it’s actually a sacred gift to me. This is one of the reasons that sharing the stories of the prepared deaths I’ve experienced is so important to me. The people I’ve met in their dying moments have changed my outlook on life, and far from depressing, I find them precious and inspiring.
Take Jason, eighty, married, with children and grandchildren. When he was diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer and it was clear that he was in his final days of life, his whole family gathered in the home where he and his wife, Susan, had raised their children.
I had been Jason’s hospice nurse for a few weeks, and his condition, although terminal, remained stable. The last time I made a visit, however, his condition had changed.
In the couple’s bedroom, Jason was unconscious and unresponsive. Jason and Susan’s three children and several grandchildren were gathered around his bed, thumbing through a stack of photo albums. They were laughing and crying as each of them shared their favorite family stories and memories: trips to the lake, Christmas and holiday highlights, secret childhood mischief. The love surrounding Jason was everything anyone could ask for as they moved toward death.
Wanting to honor that time but also be available for whatever they needed, I stationed myself in an office space across the hall to record my notes about the visit. As I worked, I heard snippets of the family’s conversation.
“We love you, Dad. We love you.”
“It’s so easy to love you.”
“You’ve been the best husband.”
“It’s okay. You can let go.”
“We love you.”
The entire family had transitioned effortlessly with Jason’s sudden decline and were able to say goodbye the way they wanted. To me in the other room, it felt like a powerful, sacred love. It felt, ironically, like this type of death is what life is supposed to be all about.
What I do doesn’t feel depressing because I see patients have these beautiful deaths, being welcomed in love to a place that’s good. I get to witness families and friends really loving each other well. I get to help people who are dying feel comfortable as they die and help them and their loved ones embrace the reality of death—which helps them live better and die better. I see the power in what is possible as we faithfully accompany people toward death. As professionals, and as loved ones, we have the power to make a real difference in people’s lives.
If you’re one of those people who assumes that accompanying people on their death journeys is depressing, I hope this book will open your eyes to something new…
Many Times
Maribel hadn’t married and didn’t have any children. Although she’d had many friends who loved her dearly, at the age of 102, just about everyone she’d known throughout her life was dead. At the end, Maribel had a caregiver, and she had me.
During one of my last visits, her caregiver and I sat together looking through Maribel’s photo albums and talking about how wonderful she was. As I reflected on her life that had lasted over a century, I wanted to make sure I’d understood correctly that she’d never been married, even for a short time. Although she’d been unresponsive all day, I suspected she could still hear me, so I asked,
“Maribel, were you ever married?”
Matter-of-factly, she answered, “No.”
“Maribel,” I continued, “were you ever in love?”
Eyes closed, in a weak voice, and with some attitude, Maribel answered with certainty: “Many times.”
The caregiver and I just laughed. Hell yeah. I knew that others might see a 102-year-old woman dying without being surrounded by family and friends as tragic. But with those two words—“many times”—I knew that despite the absence of children and grandchildren in that moment, there wasn’t sadness in that house. Maribel had lived a rich, beautiful life with parents, siblings, friends, and lovers who just weren’t in the room. And although I can’t anticipate exactly what the afterlife will be like, I couldn’t help but imagine Maribel drifting off to sleep and waking up surrounded by all these people she’s missed for a long time.
Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully by Julie McFadden, RN, with permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Julie McFadden, 2024.
Julie McFadden, RN, BSN—AKA Hospice Nurse Julie—is a hospice and palliative-care nurse who spent eight years in intensive-care units before transitioning to hospice work in 2015. After personally witnessing hundreds of deaths, she became a leading educator on the end-of-life experience, using social media to demystify what actually happens when people die and to reduce the fear and stigma around it. Her calm, practical explanations have reached millions across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, offering clarity on everything from hospice misconceptions to the physical and emotional processes of dying. She continues to consult and work in hospice while writing and speaking about death with compassion and transparency; her bestselling book, Nothing to Fear, distills the lessons she has learned from accompanying families through some of life’s most vulnerable moments.
For some of us, the greatest gift life offers is that someday, preferably sooner rather than later, we get to die — and not have to repeat the suffering. But when suicide is simply not an option, it basically means there’s little hope of receiving an early reprieve from our literal life sentence.
Of course, reincarnation — especially back into the average bitter Earthly human existence an indefinite number of times, the repetition of mostly unhappiness — would be Hell. From my understanding, even Buddhism [or is it Zen Buddhism?], which in large part is the positive belief in reincarnation, acknowledges that life generally is suffering or hardship interspersed with far fewer instances of genuine happiness.
Also, I read [and any reader should correct me if I’m in error] that Sigmund Freud postulated: Regardless of one’s mental health and relative happiness or existential contentment, the ultimate goal of our brain/mind is death’s bliss because of the general stressful nature of our physical existence, i.e. anxiety or “stimuli”. It’s important to clarify, however, that it’s not brain death per se that is the aim but rather the kind of absolute peace that only brain death can offer in this hectic world.
Ergo, the following lines extracted from a much larger piece:
----
.... / Could there be people who immensely suffer yet convince themselves / they sincerely want to live when in fact they don’t want to die / so great is their fear of Death’s unknown? //
No one should ever have to repeat and suffer again a single second of sorrow that passes. … Nay, I will engage and embrace the dying of my blight!
A lot of people fear a negative experience or hellish spiritual existence in the hereafter.
I believe that upon death the spirit or consciousness is — finally! — 100 percent liberated from the purely cerebrally based anxiety, agitation and contempt that may have actually blighted much of its physical existence.
Therefore, free of the corporeal shell, the soul may be wondering, ‘Why was I so angry, so much of the time? Oh, the things I said!... I really hope I didn't do damage while I was there’. ...
A few decades ago, I learned from two Latter Day Saints missionaries that their church’s doctrine teaches that the biblical ‘lake of fire’ meant for the truly wicked actually represents an eternal spiritual burning of guilt over one’s corporeal misdeeds. Bemused, I thought and said: “That’s it? Our punishment is our afterlife's guilty conscience?”
During the many years since then, however, I’ve discovered just how formidable intense guilt can be. I’ve also considered and decided that our brain's structural/chemical flaws are what we basically are while our soul is confined within our physical, bodily form. The human soul may be inherently good on its own; but trapped within the physical body, notably the corruptible brain, oftentimes the soul’s purity may not be able to shine through.
Thus, upon the multi-murderer's physical death, not only would they be 100 percent liberated from the anger and hate that blighted their physical life; their spirit or consciousness would exist with the presumably unwanted awareness of the immense amount of needless suffering they personally had caused.
Then again, maybe the human soul goes where it belongs or where it feels comfortable and right — be it hell’, ‘heaven’, somewhere in between, etcetera. This concept was suggested in a very interesting 1987 radio-broadcast sermon titled “A Bird’s Eye View of Hell”, given by a renowned preacher. I wrote a piece of fiction titled Not What It Was Supposed To Be [originally called That Other Place] that's largely themed on this premise.