Journal Contributors

Unlikely Collaborators Founded and led by CEO Elizabeth R. Koch is a nonprofit dedicated to exploring the invisible connection between our inner world and the outer one we create together. Built around the Perception Box™, a framework Elizabeth developed to examine how we as humans construct meaning, Unlikely Collaborators helps people recognize that much of the world’s external conflict begins with the unexamined internal conflict we each  carry within.

Their work invites us to pause, look inward, and reimagine the stories that shape our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world. Whether in moments of loss, misunderstanding, or profound change, Unlikely Collaborators believe that by understanding how our minds make meaning, we can transform grief into growth, separation into empathy, and tension into possibility.

Dr. Adjoa Boateng Evans is an intensive care physician, anesthesiologist, mother, and sought-after speaker who is dedicated to restoring humanism in healthcare. She earned her undergraduate degree in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University and later returned to Yale New Haven Hospital to complete her residency in anesthesiology. She went on to pursue fellowship training in critical care medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine.

Following her fellowship, Dr. Boateng Evans joined the faculty at Stanford, where she worked in both the intensive care units and operating rooms. She also served as a course director for Reflections and Contextual Medicine, a humanities course for medical students. In addition, she facilitated writing workshops for students and clinicians, using prose and poetry to shed light on the human experience we navigate in medicine.

In 2023, Dr. Boateng Evans returned to the East Coast to join the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine. She continues her clinical work as a critical care physician and anesthesiologist while also serving as a faculty associate with Duke’s Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine while also teaching in the School of Medicine.

Overall, her work in critical care medicine has facilitated a deep understanding of the vulnerability inherent at the end of life. She uses this lens to explore notions around how we live and die. Her medical humanities work centers around the “Prophesy of Pain,” as she seeks to reconcile moments of joy and suffering novel to the human condition experienced by patients and providers.

Watch her TED Talk here.

Barbara Karnes is an award-winning hospice pioneer, nurse, and end-of-life educator whose work has shaped how millions understand the dying process. Honored with the NHPCO Hospice Innovator Award and named International Humanitarian Woman of the Year, she is best known for her booklet Gone From My Sight—“the Little Blue Book”—which has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide since 1985.

The Biller Family Foundation focuses on advancing access to supportive cancer care, social impact theatre, and economic opportunity and members of the Together for Supportive Cancer Care Coalition.

Dougy Center provides grief support in a safe place where children, teens, young adults, and their families can share their experiences before and after a death. They provide support and training locally, nationally, and internationally to individuals and organizations seeking to assist children who are grieving. For information and resources, visit dougy.org.

Sarah Warren is a registered nurse, writer & activist who uses storytelling across social media to help humanize care. She is the executive director and cofounder of 501c3 non profit Don’t Clock Out, a community organization dedicated to supporting healthcare workers through the impacts of moral distress. 

Emma Heming Willis is a British and Indian/West Indian model, entrepreneur, advocate, wife, and mother of two and stepmother of three. She is the co-founder and Chief Impact Officer for Make Time Wellness, a brand dedicated to promoting women’s brain health. Emma hosts the Make Time Podcast, along with co-host and co-founder, Helen Christoni and the Make Time to Connect YouTube program, which is committed to bringing important information on cognitive wellness and dementia to those in need.

In 2022, Emma’s husband, Bruce Willis, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Since then, she has become a passionate advocate for caregivers, tirelessly raising awareness about dementia and emphasizing the importance of brain health. Emma’s backing includes pushing for government action to formally recognize FTD’s unique impact on families, patients, and healthcare systems. Her ultimate mission is to see an end to FTD and all neurodegenerative diseases.

Emma’s work has garnered widespread recognition from renowned media outlets and organizations. She was featured on this year’s cover of Town & Country’s Philanthropy Issue and named one of People Magazine’s “Women Changing the World.” Among her upcoming honors, she will receive the Honorary Clio Health Award.

Emma’s first book, The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path is available now. 

Fernando Murillo is a proud father to a 4-year-old son and a resident of the most beautiful city in the world—San Francisco, California. He spent five years working in the only licensed hospice within the California prison system, providing compassionate care to patients at the end of life.

At the age of 16, Fernando was sentenced to 41 years to life and ultimately served 24 years in prison. During his incarceration, he was featured in The New York Times Magazine article “Where Patients and Caregivers are Prisoners” and was recently included in The Book of Alchemy, a New York Times bestseller by Suleika Jaouad.

Today, Fernando is the Program Manager for the Humane Prison Hospice Project, where he is part of a dedicated team that trains incarcerated people to become peer caregivers for patients with serious illnesses.

Frish Brandt is a letter midwife and the creator of Lasting Letters, a practice that helps people find the words they most want to say to the people they love. Rooted in hospice and palliative care, her work has grown to welcome “all mortals”—anyone moved to write, with or without a diagnosis. Through careful listening, intuitive questions, and heartfelt conversation, Frish guides writers to articulate gratitude, forgiveness, memory, and meaning in letters that become lasting gifts. For her, listening is as essential as writing: it is how the right words arrive.

Homesteaders is a leader in the funeral profession and end-of-life space, partnering with funeral providers across the country to support families through the most difficult days of their lives.

Anu Gorukanti, MD, is a community pediatric hospitalist and public health advocate dedicated to health equity and racial justice. As a co-founder of Introspective Spaces, she is passionate about integrating social justice with reflection and contemplation, believing that personal introspection is key to meaningful social change. Anu strives to create spaces for reflection that foster deeper relationships, renewed purpose, and a reimagined healthcare system that honors both individuals and systemic reform.

Laura Holford, RN, MSN, is a community health nurse and educator passionate about addressing moral distress in healthcare through spiritual, reflective, and contemplative practices. As a co-founder of Introspective Spaces, Laura enjoys nothing more than accompanying others on their healing journeys, emphasizing the power of integrating contemplation with action in the daily clinical lives of healthcare workers. 

J.J. Duncan is an award-winning television producer, writer, advocate, and co-founder of the nonprofit, “Not Today Cancer,” which raises funds for childhood cancer research. She is widely known in the entertainment industry as an Executive Producer and Showrunner of such hits as Project Runway, and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, among others.

After losing her eleven-year-old son to leukemia, J.J. began using her influence as a top television producer to open up discussions of grief, mental health, and end-of-life care through story-telling. J.J. was a speaker at the EndWell conference in November of 2023, and shared about healing through personal storytelling.

She has partnered with Hollywood, Health, & Society at the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, in discussing and studying the effects of media’s responsibility for telling authentic stories involving death and dying. She has written for Variety Magazine for World Mental Health Day, disclosing her own healing journey through grief by way of storytelling on television. J.J. has visited Washington D.C. on multiple occasions, to advocate for laws affecting cancer patients, young and old.

She has multiple projects in the works to continue the conversation not only for parents who have lost children, but for anyone looking to explore their own stories of loss.

With all her focus on death, dying, and grief, it may be surprising to learn that J.J. risks delight at every turn, always looking for the funny and striving to take the story to an unexpected place of joy. 

Licensed funeral director/embalmer, educator, and host of The Death & Grief Talk Podcast, Joél equips professionals to deliver culturally inclusive end-of-life, death, and grief care rooted in the belief that “culture is the medicine for grief.” Founder of the Multicultural Death & Grief Care Academy, she helps teams build trust, honor traditions, and create protocols that serve diverse communities. 

The Multicultural Death & Grief Care Academy’s work believes that honoring culture is the medicine that helps the world heal through grief. The organization equips and empowers professionals with the tools to create authentic, culturally inclusive experiences that honor diversity and inclusion at the end of life, after death, and throughout grief support. Its trademarked methodology empowers death and grief care professionals to earn lasting trust and build connections that reflect the needs of all communities.

Atlanta-based storyteller and Pastor with a doctorate from Emory focused on grief, storytelling, and virtues. Founder of Portrait Coffee and curator of We Go On, an immersive tour extending his book We Go On: Finding Life’s Purpose in Life’s Sorrows and Joys. He builds hopeful narratives, especially for Black and Brown communities. Married to Shawndra; dad to Ava.

After a happy 30-year career as a palliative physician in the UK, Kathryn took early retirement in 2015 to figure out how to ‘do something’ about the widespread and woeful public misunderstanding of dying she encountered daily in her work. She wondered how we might recapture public understanding by using stories. Fortunately, an unanticipated invitation to describe ‘ordinary dying’ on national radio led to a huge and positive audience response, resulting in opportunities for more media work, an approach by a literary agent who brokered a book deal… and her book of stories about the lives of her patients With The End In Mind became an international best-seller, now translated into 18 languages. 

It’s all been a little bit unexpected. With a second best-selling book (Listen – how to find the words for tender conversations) under her belt and a third book on its way, Kathryn has been invited to speak at conferences, on radio and TV, and at ideas festivals across the UK and around the world. She’s on a mission to change the public conversation about dying, and her method is an age-old device for passing wisdom between generations: storytelling.

Kathryn is delighted to be invited to End Well 2025, to gather with fellow storytellers and celebrate our shared determination to re-claim dying as an important phase in all our lives.

Learn more about Kathryn’s work here.

(Photo by Darren Irwin)

The Sunday Paper is an award-winning digital publication with a mission and a purpose: to inspire hearts and minds and elevate the voices and insights of those living their wildly authentic and deeply meaningful lives while moving humanity forward. The Sunday Paper is the premiere news and lifestyle brand for those who want to live their lives above the noise. we sit at the intersection of news, inspiration, culture, health, and spirituality.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a trauma therapist, grief educator, and the founder of The Grief Mentor Method™, a framework that helps individuals and organizations navigate loss and change with clarity, compassion, and embodied resilience. Her work is deeply personal. As a child, Meghan experienced a community tragedy that shaped her lifelong commitment to understanding grief. Decades later, the deaths of both of her parents—her father after a yearlong battle with cancer, and her mother unexpectedly two years later—propelled her into an even more intimate relationship with loss.

Drawing from her personal experience and professional expertise as a therapist, Meghan created The Grief Mentor Method™ to help people name and understand the many forms of loss and learn to regulate their bodies and systems in the face of profound change. Her method has guided C-suite leaders, educators, clinicians, and communities toward building grief literacy and collective resilience.

Michael Erard is a linguist and non-fiction writer. He is the author of three books about language, the most recent of which is Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, which The Economist called “beautiful” and “strangely comforting.” Other writing has appeared in the New York Times, Science, The Atlantic, Aeon, Texas Observer, and elsewhere. He graduated from Williams College and has an MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been recognised with awards and fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Linguistics Society of America, the Max Planck Society, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities. Originally from the US, he now makes his home in the Netherlands, where he is a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University. He is also training to become an end of life doula. 

Founder, podcast host, philanthropist, and former policy advisor. After a year-long grief sabbatical, Rebecca built Grieve Leave into a global community offering practical tools, resources, and humor for intentional grieving. Host of Grief’d Up, she’s been featured in TIME, Fortune, LA Times, and more. She helped secure bereavement leave for North Carolina state employees and continues pushing policy forward.

Founded by Dr. Jessica Zitter, Reel Medicine Media uses documentary film and storytelling to inspire healthcare providers to connect to their sacred work with purpose, community, and compassion for the benefit of all. They envision a workforce inspired not just to treat but to heal.

Poet, researcher, and aspiring physician whose work bridges storytelling and medicine. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, she visited seven countries to study how communities meet dying and grief—from Ghana’s fantasy coffins to South Africa’s children’s hospice to Māori tangihanga in Aotearoa—reshaping her understanding of care in community.

Dr. Sasha Hamdani is a board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD clinical expert. She is an author, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate. Dr. Hamdani has worked closely with the White House and Surgeon General’s team to speak out about mental health awareness and was recognized by Harvard as a public health leader. She also has a robust social media following on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (@thepsychdoctormd) where she provides evidence-backed information and dispels stigma around all facets of wellness. Her book Self-Care for People with ADHD was released through Simon and Schuster in 2023 and her comprehensive ADHD management app FocusGenie launched in Fall of 2023.

Practicing internal medicine physician, journalist, End Well founder, and leading voice for values-aligned care, Shoshana produces and hosts the podcasts Before We Go and TED Health and appears regularly as a medical expert on major television networks. As executive producer of Netflix’s Oscar-nominated End Game and Robin’s Wish, her work focuses on transforming how we live, care, and connect in the face of life’s most profound moments.

Learn more about Shoshana’s work here.

Tamatha Thomas-Haase, MPA, was wife to a remarkable partner; mom to a quixotic creative; and a fierce public health practitioner, living with metastatic breast cancer. She knew the comfort provided to others by a warm, homemade meal, a note scribbled on a card or a sit on the front porch. She was told on more than one occasion that her emotions were too big and thus, she was unsupervisable. 

In that legacy snapshot, can you feel how Tamatha lived? 

Here’s the thing: Tamatha is still (very much) alive, joining End Well 2025 from within her radical mission to be remembered for the whole damn thing: her pretty parts and her ugly bits, so that her legacy is really hers. 

Professionally, Tamatha brings 30 years of public health experience facilitating communities of practice; writing tools & curricula; and leading meetings & conferences for state and federal agencies, as well as national nonprofits.

Tamatha roots her work in connection—linking people to each other and to knowledge, in service of collective wellbeing. She also brings this spirit to Grand Exit, the life-affirming death wellness podcast she co-hosts with dear friend Chelsea Leader Gold, sharing the scenic route through the life-death-legacy continuum from ever-shifting vantage points.

Seven years after being diagnosed with Stage III-C triple negative inflammatory breast cancer, Tamatha is living, now metastatically, in a beautiful pile of juxtapositions. (Maybe so are you and yours?). She is thrilled – and humbled – to share musings at End Well.

And you should know: she is still unsupervisable.

Teun Toebes (26) is an international healthcare innovator and humanitarian activist whose mission is to improve the quality of life of people with dementia worldwide. For over 3.5 years, he has been living on the closed ward of a nursing home. He has experienced why looking differently at dementia is so badly needed, which is why Teun decided to take his mission to the next level by looking beyond Dutch borders.

To find answers about how we can make the future more beautiful and inclusive, he travelled the world together with filmmaker Jonathan de Jong over the past few years for the global documentary ‘Human Forever‘ to see what we can learn from other countries. The film premiered at a G20 summit on dementia, was awarded with a Golden Calf and is now being screened in 22 countries.

Teun Toebes has more than 200 thousand followers on social media and can be seen in the international media. He’s an international speaker and previously published the #1 international bestseller ‘The Housemates’.