Refusing Treatment At Age 93
Why make your mother’s remaining time be unhappy and with more discontent than is already there due to age and illness? Being old is hard work. Our thinking processes aren't...
Something to Think About: a blog on end of life
Eating or not eating
Six Months To Live? A Doctor's Prediction
So many factors affect the length of our labor to leave this world that it is imprudent to put a specific time frame on approaching death. The closest we can...
BIRTH BACKWARDS, A Daughter's Death
At 8:17pm she took one more breath and then at 8:18 there was one more which I describe as hot caramel pouring onto vanilla ice cream. It was the most...
Explaining Pet Death To Children
Since my new booklet A Place In My Heart, When a Pet Dies has come out I have had several questions about children and pet death. It got me thinking...
A PLACE IN MY HEART, When a Pet Dies
We can be as much at a loss when our pet is dying as we are when a person is dying but there doesn’t seem to be the support and...
Calories Count
When living with a life threatening illness we are eating for two---our physical body and our disease. In most cases the disease eats before we do. If we don’t eat,...
The Balancing Act of Caring for the Dying
For healthcare professionals it is often a balancing act to care for patients and then deal with the sense of futility that is triggered when they are doing their job......
DYING Young or Old, The Signs Are The Same
There are other signs of approaching death that indicate a person with a disease (at any age) has weeks to live...
The Profound Affect of Dementia on Families
I can say that dementia doesn’t play by the rules for end of life. Withdrawing and sleeping can be present for years and does not signify approaching death. Not eating...
THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE - my latest film
My message throughout all this time has been to educate, educate, educate. Educate anyone who will listen about how people die. To help people understand how death comes, what it...
Grief During the Last Stages of His Life
From the moment of a diagnosis of a life threatening illness we begin grieving. We grieve not just the eventual losses that come with serious illness but the approaching death...
Telling A Loved One They're Dying
...not telling a person they can’t be fixed is taking away their opportunity to do and say that which is important to them. It is taking away their ability to...