By Cynthia Greenlee — 2019
End-of-life caregiving is an ancient practice that’s now re-emerging in the death positivity movement, which urges a shift in thinking about death as natural and not traumatic.
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Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.
Sean Illing and Frank Ostaseski discuss what Ostaseski has learned from the conversations he’s had with the dying.
In most modern cultures, it’s common for people to feel uneasy about death. We express this discomfort by avoiding conversations on the topic and lowering our voices when speaking of the dead and dying.
With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”
My Feb. 5 column, “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit,” prompted a deluge of information and requests for information on how people too sick to reap meaningful pleasure from life might be able to control their death.
Though I wince at the redundancy, funeral “pre-planning” is a phenomenon receiving increased attention, and a growing number of Web-based guides tell how to go about it. As www.funerals.org puts it: “Funeral planning starts at home.
Palliative care specialist BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger explain how to bring more meaning and less suffering to the end of life.
The fear of death and dying is quite common, and most people fear death to varying degrees. To what extent that fear occurs and what it pertains to specifically varies from one person to another.
Tami Simon interviews Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who have written a new beautiful book, called Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying. It explores what it means to live and die consciously, remembering who we really are, and illuminating the path that we all walk together.
Both providers and patients do have power to shape their experience together, especially if they take the time to have a few crucial conversations. In the spirit of palliation, here are a few things, as a physician, I wish I could share more often with patients and their caregivers.