As told to Laura Potter
Seeing my grandmother die had a profound effect on me. I was brought up by her from the age of 6, but she got lung cancer when I was 13. The night I was taken to say goodbye, I wished I could take her home to die in our cosy house, not this sterile hospital room. I vowed I would eventually do something to help dying people.
I learned early on that death can strike at any age. After my grandmother’s death, we lived in Denmark. Three years later my step-father dropped dead from a heart attack, aged 36. My half-sister had just been born and my mother, a widow away from home with a baby, was in pieces. Those early experiences made me ask how we could we deal with death better.