Our health care approaches squander billions on extravagant treatment regimes that end up accomplishing little, as a society we refuse to adopt the small, even tiny adjustments that could easily reduc...
[We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not...
Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.
I believe it’s imperative to bring the light of support and knowledge to patients and families when death is approaching.
A paradigm shift of viewing palliative care or hospice as a gift instead of seeing it as giving up has the potential to change the way we experience advanced age.
When I reflect on the stories of death supported by hospice care and contrast it with our story depicting an absence of support, I find myself dealing with envy and anger. I have channeled those emoti...
I told her that the pills will let her slip off and that when a person dies there comes a long clean sleep.” “That’s all,” Alexandria whispers, echoing after her, “a long clean sleep.
It took until the end of her life for me to cherish each day with my mother the way I naturally did with my brother. At the end, I loved my mother simply, without request to do better in any way, or b...
I entered the picture in the eleventh hour as a guide to the exit of his life. I navigated as best I could the role of end-of-life shepherd—a journey that I had never taken before. I have to forgive m...
The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucid...
