Something to Think About

Part of the specialness of doing your own service/celebration of his life is the planning. The gathering of those who loved him gathered together deciding how to celebrate his love and life...

Part of grieving is how you channel the feelings. Channel your anger, your disdain into how well you live your life now. Let your life experience be the learning tool...

Unfortunately, children die. We are born, we experience, and then we die. That's the name of this game called life...

First we have to recognize that to some degree we are all grieving this season. Then we make a conscious decision to lift the heavy veil and peek beyond it, let a...

We tend to carry within our memory every death encounter we have ever had.  Yes, even we professionals who work with end of life. BUT it is the personal deathbed memory,...

I’ll say again we are a planet grieving. What does grief look like? Grief is an emotional expression. It comes out in the way we have learned to express our...

The showing and expressing of emotions is so individual, expressing our grief is individual also. Some cry, some show anger, some depression, some “tough it up" and move forward, some...

I don't think it is about the cleanliness of the body but of the hands-on ritual of saying goodbye. Bathing is an intimate ritual. It can be a way of...

Aside from pleasing or displeasing others let's look at some issues that can occur as the result of becoming socially and or romantically involved soon after a death of a...

Maybe, at some point, you can find a place even though you move frequently. A place that has meaning to them or to you. Plant a tree in a park...

Grief is whole bunch of normal emotions rolled up into a package we call grieving. It isn’t new emotions. It is our emotions. It is how we have handled everything...

First, if you don’t have to clean out belongings, don’t for awhile, wait even months if necessary. There can be great comfort found in putting on an unwashed sweater of...

Counseling is a support offering, a choice. Some personalities would never consider counseling. They would not be comfortable sharing their personal thoughts and life with someone else no matter how professional...

... if we would educate ourselves before we need the information, before someone we care about is dying, before we are faced with a life threatening illness, or before someone we...

You asked why your relationship to your hospice work was affected following the death of your dad. I think because every time you entered a patient's home and life it...

Keeping Secrets: “Don’t tell mom.” Don’t say that she could die.” Don’t talk to her about “sad” things.” “Pretend everything is going to be alright.”  Mom lives inside of her body....

I get a lot of letters like the one I’ve edited below. We, as a culture, are so unprepared for witnessing a death. We have no accurate role models. We...

When someone we know or are close to dies we expect to grieve. We recognize our sadness but often we don’t recognize our impulsiveness to clean the house, or our...

Our children are not supposed to die before we do. I cannot think of any grief more intense than watching our child deteriorate before our eyes. We grieve their dying...

Sudden death by accident, suicide and certainly by violence intensifies those normal grief responses. Everything we feel with normal grief is as if we are being held under a magnifying...

Our job as an end of life specialist is to address the elephant in the room, to be direct and honest in the gentlest way possible. We are not doing...