Something to Think About

Question: Is there anything a person can do to help family members break through denial? Boy, is it unpleasant to be the truth-teller to a person who isn’t ready to...

Question: I have been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer and liver cancer. I am not at this moment yet, but wonder, how long? No one can be specific as...

While individual differences may be seen in the time of days to weeks before death, everyone who is dying will have the signs of approaching death that occur hours to...

QUESTION: Can you talk about dis-ease and how we bring this upon ourselves? Another great controversial question. Although there is more and more research which points to stress being related...

We die a gradual death according to our personality and if that personality is protective then we may protect a person we care about by dying when they are not...

We will meet the challenge of a gradual death in the same manner we have met other challenges in our life. Dying a gradual death is just one more challenge...

When we begin the gradual dying process our personality doesn’t change, it intensifies. If we are an angry person we will get angrier. If we are a gentle personality we...

There are very few dying 101 classes to tell people what it is like to die. In fact, few people are comfortable enough to talk about death even when they...

This was put on my web site by an anonymous donor. I think it is a beautiful story about relationships. How we touch each other and are interconnected in ways...

There are really just two ways to die: fast or gradual. Fast death occurs quickly by way of an accident, a heart attack, a stroke or suicide. A person is...

Linda, an RN living in Arkansas, is sharing her story with us. I remember Michael so clearly because of his last wish and how the hospice team helped to make...

I had the pleasure of spending three days with a man and his wife. We’ll call the man Harry and his wife Lila. The days were spent mainly feeding Harry,...

The following story had been written by one of our Excela Health Hospice nurses, Kim Kistler. I had read it about 2 years ago and always remembered it as such...

I had a hospice patient who was a retired builder and lived in the country. Two days after I began taking care of him I also began taking care of...

I think it’s a great idea to share stories and learn from each other. I learn something new with every case. It’s funny, because nobody but a hospice nurse truly...


The death rattle is not always present. Those people that have more fluid or are more hydrated as they approach death, are the ones most likely to experience this natural...

Beware of anyone who puts a number on how long someone has to live. There are so many factors that affect the time of our gradual death that the closest...

In the months before a gradual death we really don’t believe death will happen to us or to those we love. In the days to weeks before gradual death occurs...

QUESTION: “What about the lack of desire to do anything but sleep?” When a person has entered the dying process three things begin to happen: their eating decreases, sleep increases...

From the moment we are born we begin to die. We are born, we experience and then we die. All the space between birth and death is living yet we...

I recently received a question from “What would you like me to write about?”. The question was: For 20 years I have been asking for a slightly more technical explanation...