Dr. Kevin Dieter spent more than three decades in family medicine and hospice care before stepping back to ask a hard question: what happened to the model Dame Cicely Saunders actually built? 

In this conversation, Kevin traces hospice's drift from Saunders's total pain approach toward something medicalized, monetized, and institutionalized, then walks through what he found after four months and sixty-plus conversations with end-of-life doulas across the country. 

We talk about the moment a dying person's tether gets cut, the twenty-thousand-foot abyss that follows, and why the people meant to reconnect that tether are often stretched too thin to be there. 

Kevin also previews a conference he's organizing for April 2027, bringing the medical community, doulas, and caregivers to the same table for the first time, built around one metric: human dignity.