About Dying to Tell You

We are all born with an expiration date.

As a Palliative Care Chaplain with over a decade of experience, Cody Hufstedler knows how difficult it can be for us all to acknowledge—much less talk about—the fact that we're all born with an expiration date. Working at a Denver hospital, he has helped countless terminally ill patients and their loved ones work through this most challenging of life's realities.

What he's discovered over the years is the understanding, comfort, and even joy that can come through intentionally facing our finish line. Not just for those who are fast approaching it, but for everyone young or old, sick or healthy.

Cody began this podcast as a way to share these endearing and lovely stories of life, death, and dying. Far from morbid, these episodes are deeply alive explorations of life's greatest mysteries and windows into the wonderful, human richness of living.

Intimate Conversations About Living Fully

Dying to Tell You features one-on-one conversations between Cody and guests who are living with serious illness—including cancer, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Alzheimer's disease, brain cancer, multiple myeloma, and other terminal diagnoses. These aren't patients of his; ethical boundaries are carefully maintained. Rather, these are intimate dialogues with people from across the country and around the world who are willing to share their experiences with mortality.

Topics We Explore

Each episode addresses the real experiences of facing death and dying:

• Living vs. Surviving: How people with terminal illness choose quality of life over simply extending their days

• Mental Health in Serious Illness: The critical role of therapy, processing grief, and maintaining emotional wellbeing during cancer treatment and other terminal diagnoses

• Relationships and Community: How serious illness transforms every relationship and the power of feeling seen and valued

• Faith and Spirituality: Diverse perspectives on death, the afterlife, and finding peace—welcoming all spiritual traditions and none

• Caregiving: Stories from adult children, spouses, and family members navigating the challenges of caring for dying loved ones

• Medical Decision-Making: Choices about treatment, clinical trials, hospice care, and balancing hope with reality

• Purpose and Legacy: Finding new meaning, advocacy work, and what we want to leave behind

• Anticipatory Grief: Processing future losses and the many forms grief takes

• Identity: Who we are when illness changes everything, from our bodies to our roles in life

Cody joined Chandra Thomas Whitfield on Colorado Public Radio for a wonderful segment on their Aging Matters program.