Marianne Matzo is among a growing cadre of hospice professionals who are working to change the public conversation and perceptions of death.

Matzo has been a registered nurse for 47 years and holds a Ph.D in gerontology. She was the first endowed professor of palliative care nursing in the nation, the Earle Zeigler Endowed Chair in Palliative Care Nursing at the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing.

A year into her retirement from clinical and teaching work, she founded an organization called Everyone Dies, inspired by the project Death in America, which was established by George Soros in the mid-1990s. The project’s goal was to educate clinicians who would engage in dedicated efforts to change how people die in the United States.

Everyone Dies has grown to have a substantial social media presence with more than 20,000 followers across multiple platforms. It also publishes a podcast and has produced a children’s book designed to help kids better understand death and dying.

Hospice News sat down with Matzo to discuss Everyone Dies and her work to change how Americans encounter and perceive death.

Could you tell me a little more about Everyone Dies?

[The health care community] has focused so much on education of nurses and physicians on the knowledge to care for people, but we never focused on public education to say

you’re going to die and you have a measure of control of how that’s going to happen.

I thought that’s what we need to do next; we need to focus on public education. So after I retired, we started a nonprofit called Everyone Dies. And a year after I retired, we started to do our first podcast, and so now we’re at our five-year anniversary.

We’ve done a podcast every week for the last five years, and they’re all public education regarding serious illness, dying, death and bereavement. And the beauty of it is that they’re available 24/7 anywhere in the world; 25% of our audience is from all around the world, and 75% are from the United States, and that has stayed consistent over the five years.

I write these podcasts to tell people what I said to patients and families when I worked as a hospice nurse, or when I was a palliative care consultant, or when I taught my nursing students or my physician students. So it’s the same information, but clearly explained.

My co-host is a layperson actor in New York, Charlie Navarrepte. We give our email. We’re on social media. People can contact us. People can write and say, “Here’s the question that I have.”

What do you hope to achieve through the work you’re doing? What are your goals?

I’m staying with my promise to George Soros, in terms of wanting to change the culture of death and dying in this country. I have seen too many bad deaths, and it’s not necessary. I’ve seen so many people who are afraid of death and afraid of hospice care.

My point is, everyone dies. It’s not optional, and Americans, more than any other country, see death as an optional thing. We also like to think that those are things that happen to other people, like, “I can not wear a seat belt; I will be fine. Other people have car accidents.”

My goal was that people would see this and they would say, “Oh my God, I don’t know anything about that, and I’m going to learn about it.”

I’ve had pushback on social media from people saying, “How can you say that? I don’t want to see in my feed that everyone dies.”

You know the same Memento Mori — “Remember you will die.” Remember you’re human. Remember you have frailties. And so what if we lived more intentionally? Our last line of every show is, “Every day is a gift.” I’ve seen so many friends and patients who live in such a way as though time goes on forever.

How did you go about establishing Everyone Dies? What was that process like?

We established a nonprofit, and then we established the podcast. We didn’t know anything about either one of those things, so we did a lot of learning, a lot of trial and error.

Honestly, the one thing that we really are not any better about, is marketing. hHow do you market this? Plus, we’re a nonprofit with very minimal donations, so how do you market it if you don’t have any money? Those are the things that we struggle with.

We have good, accurate information, without any drama. So one thing we struggle with is how to have more people find out about it and utilize it.

So that was our process. The other thing I always wanted to do was, in part, the grand plan of changing the culture.I thought, “What if people could grow up not afraid of death?” So we wrote a children’s book called “Everyone Dies.” It gives a common language for adults to be able to talk to children, and for children to be able to say, “I understand that.”