‘To Know Ends’ podcast: The death talk Millennials and Gen Zs never got

Chesapeake Health Partners recently launched “To Know Ends,” a new podcast that explores the conversations many people avoid, the care they don’t understand and the people who carry them through it. While the series speaks to listeners of every age, it is especially aimed at Millennials and Gen Zers, many of whom are quietly navigating caregiving, serious illness, grief and loss for the first time, often without the language or community to talk about it.

Younger generations are facing these realities earlier and more often than they expected: caring for aging parents or grandparents while raising young kids of their own, supporting a friend through a serious diagnosis, grieving losses that don’t fit neatly into a single conversation. “To Know Ends” was built to meet them there, with real stories instead of platitudes.

“Millennials and Gen Zers are already living this,” said Chance Kitt, host and producer of “To Know Ends.” “They’re raising families while caring for aging parents, sitting with a friend through a hard diagnosis, grieving losses without a support group of peers. Our generation has few ways to talk about any of it. This podcast is our attempt to change that, one honest conversation at a time.”

“To Know Ends” asks a simple but profound question: What does it mean to live well all the way to the end? Each episode features voices from inside and outside the world of hospice and palliative care, including hospice team members, caregivers, artists and people who have sat beside someone they loved as they died. Guests speak candidly about what aging, decline and dying actually look like and what becomes possible when we stop running from those realities. Like much of the show’s intended audience, many of the guests are part of the Millennial and Gen Z generations themselves, offering listeners a peer, not just an expert, a story they can relate to.

The podcast’s title carries a double meaning. To know ends is to understand what it’s like when someone looks honestly at decline, loss and death rather than looking away. It is also to know no ends, the discovery that confronting mortality honestly doesn’t shrink a life. It expands it.

The series opens with the story of Victoria Ivicek, an intake coordinator with Hospice of the Chesapeake. Before she ever answered the phone for a family seeking help for a loved one, she was one of them.

When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Ivicek 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 didn’t look anything like what she’d assumed hospice would be. 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 led her to the other side of the phone. Today, Victoria is part of the clinical support team at Hospice of the Chesapeake, where she carries her father’s story into every conversation she has with families navigating the same uncertainty she once felt, a story that resonates with a generation only beginning to face these same questions.

Other upcoming episodes are as follows:

Episode 2 — Alena Dailey, integrative arts and Chesapeake Life Center manager

Episode 3 — Jennifer Ward, Chesapeake Life Center bereavement counselor

Episode 4 — Perry Platt, inpatient care center clinical manager

Episode 5 — Emily Jacobs, clinical practice specialist for nurses

“To Know Ends” is part of Chesapeake Health Partners’ broader commitment to helping everyone in the community, at every age and every stage, cope with aging, serious illness, end-of-life issues, grief and loss. Whether the concern is a first conversation about hospice or a difficult diagnosis, the message is the same for listeners of any generation: you are not alone and neither are the guests who share these stories.

To Know Ends is available now on https://toknowendspodcast.buzzsprout.com/2629131 and wherever podcasts are found.

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About Hospice of the Chesapeake

Hospice of the Chesapeake provides expert, compassionate care for individuals and families navigating serious advanced illness and loss. Care is built around a genuine partnership between skilled clinicians, healthcare partners and the patients and families we serve — centered on supporting quality of life at every stage.

For more than 45 years, we have had the privilege of caring for more than 65,000 patients and more than 100,000 family members across the communities we serve.

Hospice of the Chesapeake is proud to be a part of Chesapeake Health Partners, an organization focused on strengthening community-based care and support services across the region.