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What if dying meant being surrounded by love? And if dying didn’t scare us, how would we choose to live?
The Last Ecstatic Days is more than a movie...
It's a movement.
The goal of the conscious living and dying movement, also known as the community deathcare movement, is to make the act of dying a loving and communal experience again. As humankind has made incredible strides in prolonging life, we have increasingly forgotten that death is a part of life and should be embraced alongside all of life’s stages. This matters because how a culture treats death is how that culture treats its dying. When we neglect and ignore death’s inevitability, we neglect and ignore the dying. In this way, our fear of death can become self-fulfilling. But accepting and embracing death allows dying to be done in community and surrounded by love. The love becomes self-fulfilling. Crucially, how we think about death also informs how we live.
By showing us how death can be an experience of love and belonging, the conscious dying movement – and The Last Ecstatic Days – aspire to show us how life can be as well.
Motivation
We have forgotten how to die. What was once an everyday relational and life-affirming experience has now become an expensive, and often lonely and isolating medical event. This wasn’t always the case. For millennia, death took place in community and was embraced as a natural, relational, and nonmedical part of life – an experience deserving of dignity, meaning, and intention.
Our team has witnessed the isolated deaths of countless individuals and seen the impact it had on both the dying and their loved ones who in most cases lacked the preparation, support, and community to make positive sense out of the experience. But we have also facilitated and witnessed the reverse: the transformative power of bringing loved ones together with the dying and ensuring the journey is one of nurturing, healing, and joy. These contrasting experiences – heart-wrenching and heart-warming – inspired us to make The Last Ecstatic Days, so that it might inspire others.
We believe everyone deserves the same opportunity to receive an intentional and personalized approach to care. Death is our final act of living, and restoring our relationship to the experience of dying has the power to positively transform our experience of living. We made The Last Ecstatic Days to inspire audiences with a vision of what is possible when we allow death to be embraced with love, and to provide tools and resources to those wishing to embark on their own transformative journeys.
Workshops and Training
Our impact campaign meets a vital cultural need for us to become more comfortable discussing death. Viewers of this film crave a space to share their experiences not only to process what they just saw but also share their own stories of (often unsupported and unprepared) deaths. This impact campaign is designed to ensure that all audiences are heard and that those inspired by the film are given the tools to engage more deeply in this movement. Through facilitated discussion, participants will be invited to courageously meet their fear of death with love and community, and be transformed in the process. Our flagship workshop is designed to foster authentic connection and story sharing, offering participants a chance to embrace the wholeness of the human experience – even death – as life-affirming. Attendees emerge with the realization that the one thing we’re afraid of may be the cure we’ve always needed to live a truly soulful, purposeful existence.
In a world hungry for meaning and belonging, this impact campaign has the potential to travel the world over the next decade, transforming those who participate in our workshops and sparking awareness of the community death care movement at the heart of this film.
Aditi Sethi, MD
Inspired by her experience of caring for Ethan Sisser, Aditi Sethi, hospice doctor and death doula, founded the Center for Conscious Living and Dying (CCLD) in Asheville, North Carolina. Featured in the forthcoming film The Last Ecstatic Days, Aditi is an emerging and important voice for shifting our culture’s understanding and approach to dying, death, and bereavement care. As a child under the guidance of her parents (Kapil and Ranjit Sethi) and grandparents from India, Aditi studied devotional music from the Sikh and Hindu traditions. Her other music pursuits include playing music with her husband, Jay Brown, a musician and hospice music therapist. Aditi and Jay recently formed a group called The Appalucians, with Angie Heimann and Cas Sochaki. Releasing their first CD “Bright Hills” in 2018, the Appalucians play music from the mountains of Western North Carolina, featuring spirited songwriting, tight harmonies, and a lovely layered interplay between dobro, guitars, harp, bass, and banjo. Aditi and Jay are the parents of three amazing children.
“Death doesn’t need to be lonely.”
Lead Outreach Partner
Founded by Aditi Sethi, CCLD is a nonprofit organization that provides nonmedical, community supported end-of-life care free of charge. CCLD is not a nursing home, hospice house, or medical facility. It is a home where a community is remembering how to live and die together, mindfully. And although it is a physical space, more than that, it is a belief in motion. It is a community coming together to focus on what it means to be with someone as they are dying as well as walking alongside one another to lead a conscious life. It is a spark designed to ignite a flame of change. It is shifting our culture’s end-of-life care paradigm, creating a model of accessible, holistic end-of-life care, while also embodying what it means to live consciously in community. The CCLD model will be taught to communities throughout the US and internationally.
The Last Ecstatic Days Impact Campaign spreads awareness of CCLD’s model and thus creates the shift toward this new paradigm of conscious end-of-life care and conscious living. Additionally, CCLD will also offer extensive workshops and training programs so audiences will be able to learn how to provide exceptional end-of-life care the way that Ethan’s community did, led by teachers who helped care for Ethan in The Last Ecstatic Days including Aditi Sethi, Greg Lathrop, and Hannah Fowler.
Outreach Partners
