Guest Contributor: Viki Kind 4. Think about the kind of death you are choosing. With CPR, you might not have the opportunity for a peaceful and profound death experience. When you picture the last minutes of your loved one’s life, do you see strangers straddling the patient on a bed, pushing on the patient’s chest, Read more . . .
Guest Contributor: Viki Kind CPR or cardiopulmonary resuscitation used to be very simple to understand. Cardio stands for heart, pulmonary stands for lungs and resuscitation means to revive from death. When a patient died, someone would push on the person’s chest to try to restart the heart while giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to help the person Read more . . .
When I was diagnosed with cancer—years ago now, I am happy to report—I faced an inner crisis of meaning. Sitting on the front step alone at 2:00 am, I realized with a profound shock that the cancer didn’t MEAN anything. It didn’t mean I was good or that I was bad. It didn’t mean my Read more . . .
She was a very savvy, determined woman who had been a medical professional and served on a variety of boards and committees. We’ll call her Joan. Yet, for all her intelligence and savvy, as Joan lay near death in a palliative care ward after battling cancer for 11 years, with a house in her name Read more . . .
Death may touch upon Christmas (or any other major holiday) in a few ways: a loved one may die on or near the date, the family may be keeping vigil through the holidays, and then the first feast day after a death will likely be difficult to face. Whatever the details, death can cast its Read more . . .
In the previous post, I shared an introduction to making a visit to someone who is dying: the basics of hospital etiquette, really. In this post I’d like to share some ways you might attempt to prompt a deeper sort of sharing with someone who is dying. In the next post, I will share some Read more . . .
The use of narcotic drugs in end of life care continues to be debated. On the one side, opiates are seen as addictive substances with criminal usage associations that might wrongly alter a dying person’s experience of reality. On the other side, opiates are seen as the most effective pain controllers available to us, the Read more . . .
The family caregiver for someone who is dying needs to come to terms with feeling inadequate. The task may be taken on willingly and even lovingly but it is hugely demanding and most of us have no experience upon which to draw. Indeed, in an absolute sense nobody is fully adequate to this task, so Read more . . .
It was Christmas day and in all the fun and frolic and feasting we neglected to call an older relative. Two days later she was dead and we all learned an important lesson: “Don’t wait until it is too late.” The 2007 movie, The Bucket List, reminded many of us that even with a terminal Read more . . .
If you are anticipating your own death, or that of a loved one, you may be wondering what to expect when the dying process really begins. The following is a brief introduction to the stages of dying, although there are of course some variations in the sequence or timing. Before describing the process, I want Read more . . .