The project initiator and managing director of Familienhörbuch gGmbH is Judith Grümmer. journalist. Radio “maker”. Audio biographer. Mother of three adult sons. Widowed since 2018. She lives in the Rhineland as well as in the Eifel.

‘Drawing a piece of life with the microphone, giving people a voice – that was more than 30 years of my work for Deutschlandfunk and Westdeutscher Rundfunk – whether in the clinic or in the living room, whether in the State Chancellery or in prison, in the hospice, at school or under the bridge.

As a medical journalist, I specialized in PalliativCare topics very early on and had already encountered the important questions of life and death as a young mother. As a radio ‘maker’, I was often fascinated by the power of the human voice as a mirror of his soul.

The idea of giving dying mothers and fathers with small or growing children the opportunity to tell their life story and leave it as a professionally designed audiobook arose when my own children were still very small.

In particular, the maternal voice is the first thing an unborn child perceives. The ear is the sensory organ that perceives the outside world in the womb. The human voice is as unique as a fingerprint. And the voice is also the first thing the bereaved person forgets or can no longer remember when a loved one has died.

After more than 30 years, I hung up on the radio ‘making’ to focus on working with palliative patients. In 2016/17 I completed a training course Palliative Care for psychosocial occupational groups at the Malteser Akademie. As a project initiator and since 2019 as managing director of the family audiobook gGmbH, which is recognised as a non-profit organisation, it is now my task to make audio biographies for palliative care patients with young children fit for the future as a free therapy-accompanying offer and perhaps even to be able to establish them in the German healthcare system at some point.”

Judith Grümmer is also the author of the audiobook ‘Leben Sie gut. History of German Palliative Medicine”, which is distributed free of charge by the German Cancer Aid for patients, students and staff in the field of palliative medicine and hospice movement. In preparation for the project, she participated in an extra-occupational palliative care training course at the Maltese Academy of Palliative Medicine and conducted interviews with palliative patients on a voluntary basis for several years both for the Cologne University Hospital, the Centre for Palliative Medicine and for the specialist journal Leitfaden. She is also a member of the expert jury of the DGP and the German Palliative Foundation for the Communication Prize.