Bart Windrum Presentations

April 2018: The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying is published and available. See this site’s books pages for more. Contact me if you’d like a unique, invigorating keynote, plenary, or workshop for your tribe, near or far.

I offer lay and provider audiences a unique voice and refreshing viewpoint addressing patient (I prefer persient—a person in need of medical attention) empowerment, medical advocacy, and what’s required of us to die in peace. My goals when presenting are to:

• provide actionable guidance
• clear emotional, mental, and spiritual cobwebs
• challenge and expand worldview and sense of personal responsibility and ability
• entertain through occasional levity and personal stories
• directly tie each presentation to each audience’s focus

I customize every talk, shaping each to provide the most value and impact on each audience. I guarantee you will hear new thoughts about medical advocacy and dying in peace that you have not previously heard and acquire beneficial, applicable insights. Peruse a representative topics list here. Meeting Planners: I present to both lay and professional audiences. I’m recognized as a nationally contributing patient activist by organizations like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the Lown Institute. By perusing this site you’ll know why. Let’s shape a powerful presentation for your upcoming event. Providers: Offer your colleagues and students the opportunity to hear from an informed citizen who’s morphed into a patient advocate. Bring a unique voice to your people. Employers: Are your sandwich-generation employees or employees with elder parents distracted? Minimize employee distraction today.

Videos

Videos are arranged in reverse chronological order.

Our Dying Territory: An Overview May 2020. This two-hour Zoom session offers a condensed tour of my complete end-of-life lexicon as presented in my second book, The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying. It condenses what was to have been a half-day and an evening session at Doorway Into Light’s 4th International Death Doula Training on Maui, Hawaii, precluded by the emergence of Covid-19. Host Bodhi Be and we instructors recorded live sessions with participants over seven consecutive days. After an introductory grounding, Bodhi introduces me at 21:00 and I take it from there. This refined offering succinctly condenses what I learned through direct experience and years of rumination and development. It includes a highly refined slide deck. Enjoy!

Our Dying Territory: Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms May 2020. In this half-hour session I name and describe all seventeen dying situations (“landings”) comprising our dying territory as described by Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms—a unique work of citizen-thanatology. This session is embedded within session six of seven we recorded after Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the 4th International Death Doula Training on Maui, Hawaii. Host Bodhi Be asked me to run down Windrum’s Matrix in its entirety. My presentation runs from 5:00–27:00, then Jerrigrace Lyons presents her work. Since the session as planned was devoted to Jerrigrace, her visage appears below.

Choosing How to Die May 2014. This half-hour talk summarizes Overcoming the Obstacles to Dying in Peace. I presented it in the context of a larger evening’s program at Denver’s Mercury Cafe entitled Choosing How to Die which explored choice for direct personal control over one’s dying, a choice made previously by a British citizen who travelled to Switzerland and a choice being pondered at the time by a Denver Colorado USA citizen where aid in dying was not yet available. The evening included Terry Pratchett’s documentary, Choosing to Die (available for viewing here), Robert Mitton’s presentation plus his and my audience QA session (available here).

TEDxFoCo: Dying IN Peace to Die AT Peace: New Terms of Engagement May 2013. TED and TEDx events are widely considered to be premier speaking venues. This 20 minute talk synthesizes my old and new work from 2004 through 2013, reframing dying in peace within the context of identifying and overcoming obstacles. It runs down the first five obstacles to peaceful dying, experienced by my family twice; includes a performance of Windrum’s Never Say Die Rap, a wry musical take on our absurd existential quandary; presents a concise introductory explanation of Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms™, which for the first time both identifies and objectively names the full range of sixteen dying situations ahead of all of us; rebuts the labeling of choice in dying as “a sideshow;” and offers an homage to and repurposing of my father’s antics as a “quick printing” shop owner in the 1970s and 80s:

Windrum’s Never Say Die Rap premier and Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms introduction at Ignite Denver November 2012. Ignite talks are rapid-fire 5 minute presentations where your 20 slide deck auto-advances one slide every 15 seconds. The format is quick, part pressure cooker and part game, and typically draws a younger crowd. Ignite audiences are a bit roudy, partying throughout a night of fifteen talks. This presentation was challenging to prepare, breathless to perform, and worth its several risk factors. The Rap delivery is flawed; the Matrix an early iteration; this talk contains the seeds from which the TEDx talk sprouted:

Hospital Corporation of America Annual Ethics Conference Keynote October 2009. An early “from lay person to patient advocate” sharing my journey and key insights with an interested provider audience. Interspersed with personal interviews:

 Keynote/plenary and workshop topics

• Our Dying Territory: Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms
• To Die in Peace: Our Rights of Passage
• Dying IN Peace to Die AT Peace: New Terms of Engagement
• Cool, Calm, Collected: How to Advocate When Hospitalized
• From Lay Person to Patient Advocate: An Informed Citizen’s Story