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How to Find Meaning in the Face of Death

By Emily Esfahani Smith — 2017

The time between diagnosis and death presents an opportunity for “extraordinary growth.”

Read on www.theatlantic.com

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Ram Dass Is Ready to Die

For more than 50 years, Ram Dass has watched as other nontraditional spiritual leaders have come and gone while he has remained.

Article
David Marchese
2019
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Advice on Dire Diagnoses From a Survivor

With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”

Article
Jane E. Brody
2007
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A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit

Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.

Article
Jane E. Brody
2008
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Don’t Tell Me When I’m Going to Die

Prognoses are more of an art than a science. Maybe it’s better not to know.

Article
BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
2019
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What Is Death?

This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. It’s one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own.

Article
BJ Miller
2020
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The Secret to Superhuman Strength: An Illustrated Meditation on the Life of the Body, the Death of the Self, and Our Search for Meaning

Since long before we had neuroscience to tell us that our feelings begin in our bodies and shape our consciousness, we humans have been unconsciously using our bodies to control our feelings.

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Maria Popova
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Why Cancer Patients Don’t Have Enough Information to Make Decisions About Their Treatments

In the past four years, Bruce Mead-e has undergone two major surgeries, multiple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy to treat his lung cancer. Yet in all that time, doctors never told him or his husband whether the cancer was curable — or likely to take Mead-e’s life.

Article
Liz Szabo
2017
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Living with Mortality: Life Goes On

Understanding the patterns of reaction to a prolonged illness with perhaps years of remission and a significant chance of being cured will help you put your emotional survival in focus while your doctor concentrates on your physical survival.

Article
Malin Dollinger, Bernard Dubrow
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What Scares Me About Getting Old

I’ve discovered that growing older hasn’t been a Lego-like replacement of “young” Ken figures with increasingly older versions. Instead, all of these younger selves are still very much alive and thriving, layered and integrated over the years.

Article
Kenneth Dychtwald
2021
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The Aging Spirit’s Guide

The expert in the spiritual dimensions of aging and dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, has herself died, in October 2017, in her early 70s, from a “form of cancer,” in her words, that she had not known about, or at least had not told people about.

Article
John P. Schuster
2018
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EXPLORE TOPIC

Facing Own Death