And then, about 13 years into their marriage, everything changed.

Amanda and Terence both had fulfilling careers. RAZ: And for a long time, things were great. And he said, let's get married, travel the world and have lots of kids. Well how long would you have talked to me if I told you we're in soybeans?īENNETT: I said, you jerk - only jerk wasn't the word I used. I don't understand - soybeans? You told me you were a Fulbright scholar. He was the China representative for the American Soybean Association. Only months later, I discover who he really was. I'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories I planned to write. What a gift it was to the eager young foreign correspondent that I was then. And he turned out to be a Fulbright scholar there in China specifically to study Sino-Soviet relations. And one night she went to a party.īENNETT: I sat down next to a stout, middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bowtie. She was on a reporting assignment in China. And on the TED stage, Amanda described the moment they met. But before we get there, a little bit about their life before. They'd been married for about 20 years when he passed away back in 2007. RAZ: The story of Amanda's relationship to death and her idea for changing the way we ought to think about it actually starts with her late husband, Terence.

You can't picture what death is all about.īENNETT: We kind of push away death, and we've got a pretty much arm-length relationship with it.

You actually can envision and picture it. And that distance from death is part of what makes it so difficult to talk about.ĪMANDA BENNETT: I mean, you think about people going on to a new job or moving to a different part of the world. So for most of us, if we're relatively healthy, death seems like a distant thing.

The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett