My Friend Death? - Lecture with Esben Dalgaard

My Friend Death? is a lecture by actor, host, author and speaker Esben Dalgaard, drawing on his own experiences with serious illness and confronting mortality. He asks whether one can actually become friends with death - and whether one should. Starting from the painful realization that his youngest daughter was hit harder than necessary by the news of his diagnosis, he argues that we Danes are poorly equipped to talk about the only life fact we know for certain: that we all must leave one day.

Dalgaard has engaged deeply with the theme through DR's podcast series Before We Die and the TV programme My Last Gift, and in 2024 he received both the Life & Death Prize and the Danish Cancer Society's Honorary Award. For the lecture, he has travelled in Denmark as well as to Mexico, the Philippines and Japan to gather knowledge about other ways of handling life's darker side.

The lecture includes filmed interviews with, among others, former chairman of the Ethics Council Jacob Birkler, hospital chaplain at Rigshospitalet Lotte Mørk, hospice director Winnie Poulsen and Flemming Madsen from Life Ceremonies - as well as clips from conversations with people from the countries he has visited. Research shows that Danes want to talk about death, but don't know how. The lecture offers no final answers, but is a shared exercise in doing exactly that.