My son’s death was ‘absolutely beautiful’

Available for over a year

Jessica Hanson is determined that people should be able to have, what she calls 'a beautiful death'. She believes that a 'good' experience of death can be unexpectedly empowering for loved ones and she trains doctors and nurses to help them make this a possibility. It all stems from losing her young son Mason, three years ago. Jessica works as a trauma nurse in the state of Arizona in the US and before the death of her son, death wasn't something she thought about that deeply. In the 1960s, a bunch of musically gifted, pre-teen siblings from Saigon put together a rock ‘n’ roll group. For a while the CBC Band was the biggest music act in South Vietnam, even headlining the country’s first international rock festival. They had an unlikely fan base – battle-weary US soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. A longer version of this programme is available on the Outlook podcast. (Image: Jessica Hanson. Courtesy of Jessica Hanson.)