What does it mean to live well all the way to the end?
To Know Ends is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the care we don't understand, and the people who show up anyway. Each episode features voices from inside and outside the world of hospice and palliative care — nurses, social workers, caregivers, artists, and people who have sat beside someone they loved as they died — speaking honestly about what aging, decline, and dying actually look like, and what becomes possible when we stop running from those realities.
The title means two things at once. To know ends is to understand what a closing looks like. It is also to know no ends — to discover that confronting mortality honestly doesn't shrink a life. It expands it.
Episode 3:
Take The Cape Off
Some people spend their whole lives holding everyone else together. Jennifer Ward's work begins the moment they finally set that weight down.
A licensed social worker and bereavement counselor, Jennifer came to this work through the loss of her grandmother, the matriarch of a family of fifteen. She sits down with host Chance for an honest conversation about grief, faith, and why the hardest conversations about aging and the end of life are so often the ones we never have, especially in the Black community.
Together they get into the fear that keeps families from asking for help, the silence around mental health, the grief that arrives long before a loss, and what changes when we lead with life instead of leading with the word hospice. Jennifer's invitation is a simple one: you can take the cape off here.
For anyone who has ever had to be the strong one. This is a place to put it down.
Episode 2:
The Language Before Words
Alena Dailey spent 15 years working in senior living, watching hospice teams care for residents and their families from the outside. She understood the landscape. She knew the language. She thought she was ready.
Then, at 29, she became her grandmother's primary evening caregiver. And everything she thought she knew fell away.
What followed was a year and a half on hospice that Alena now calls the best out of the last five years of her life. Not because the dying stopped, but because the rushing did. Because a layer of support arrived that let her be more than just a caregiver. It let her be a granddaughter again.
In this episode, Alena teaches us about healing touch—not as a technique, but as a choice to be fully present with another person. She talks about the moment her grandmother asked her to rub lotion on her feet, and why that small act of presence mattered more than any task on a checklist. She talks about what you'll actually miss when someone is gone. And she talks about what it takes to separate the role of caregiver from the person you are, so that neither one consumes you.
Episode 2 of To Know Ends is for anyone currently caring for a loved one, or anyone who will be.
It's a reminder that healing happens not through doing everything right, but through being present with what is.
Episode 1:
Gift Your Attention
Before Victoria Ivicek ever answered the phone for a grieving family, she was one of them.
When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Victoria watched his decline unfold faster than anyone expected. Hospice of the Chesapeake came into their home during those final six months — and what she witnessed in that time didn't look anything like what she thought hospice was. There was comfort. There was presence. There was a kind of care that didn't feel like giving up. It felt, in her words, like the opposite.
That experience brought her to the other side of the phone. Today, Victoria works as part of the clinical support team at Hospice of the Chesapeake, and she carries her father's story into every conversation she has with families navigating the same uncertainty she once felt.
Episode 1 of To Know Ends is for anyone who has ever feared the word hospice.
By the end, you might not anymore.