Something to Think About

When someone you love no longer responds, it can feel frightening. Let me show you the simple, comforting care that still matters in the final days before death.

New hospice nurses often ask me what matters most. It isn't medications or procedures. Hospice nursing is about teaching, guiding, and helping families feel safe as they walk through one...

Most people don't know what to do or can do in the final hours before death. Here are gentle ways families and caregivers can create a meaningful goodbye and bring...

Sometimes the question is not how long we can live, but how we want to live with the time we have.

Those of us who work in end-of-life care walk beside people and families during one of the most intimate times of life. Because of the emotional nature of this work,...

We educate families about the dying process, but too often no one is there when death actually happens...

When I was 17, I was told to sit with a dying patient — alone. I didn’t know then how profoundly that moment would shape my life’s work...

End-of-life care isn’t just clinical. It’s deeply personal. Before we can guide others through death, we must understand our own beliefs, fears, and experiences. When we face death honestly within...

Healing is not just about the physical body. We are mental and emotional beings that have a physical body.

Dame Cicely Saunders — an important and influential physician, nurse, social worker, and writer in end of life care — established a specific facility to care for those people that...

What do you say to someone to get them to accept hospice? Well, one thing to say after explaining the services hospice offers is to ask what they think will...

Hospice isn’t about giving up—it’s about support, comfort, and quality of life. Here is the truth behind 4 common hospice myths families often believe.

The experience of dying a gradual death is an important, integral part of life. It is an opportunity to write our final chapter, to define the ending of our story...

Just as we have to go through an intensive process to enter this world, so do we go through labor to leave it.

We used to have role models on what dying really looks like. People died at home, in their own bed. Family and friends gathered — held a vigil, so to speak. When...

Hospice began as an ideal, a step outside of the medical model. It was generally operated by volunteers and it was financed and maintained by community fundraising and donations...

Families are stressed and frightened and by the time they finally reach out for hospice services, they have already wanted and needed them for days if not weeks.

I believe everyone has the right to be told once that they can’t be fixed. It is the physician’s job to compassionately and honestly give that information...  

I am hearing stories about the lack of professional staff training for new hires, which led me to wonder about volunteer training...

For many people, nursing facilities have become their home. It is therefore reasonable that Hospice services be available in facilities. BUT care in a facility is not the same as...

In the ideal picture, the goal is the patient’s death. Everything that is done before the death is preparation for the actual moment death occurs. Everything after the death gradually eases...