By Emily Esfahani Smith — 2017
The time between diagnosis and death presents an opportunity for “extraordinary growth.”
Read on www.theatlantic.com
CLEAR ALL
Zen training talks a lot about death. But one practitioner found that it doesn’t necessarily prepare you to face your own.
Death anxiety encompasses a broad spectrum of emotions ranging from a few passing moments of fear to a complete state of panic.
The ultimate tragedy of the human condition is our awareness of our inevitable mortality.
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For many of us, thinking about death—our own, or that of anyone we love—is supremely difficult. So, most of the time, we don’t think about it at all—until we have no choice.
Tami Simon interviews Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who have written a new beautiful book, called Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying. It explores what it means to live and die consciously, remembering who we really are, and illuminating the path that we all walk together.
Both providers and patients do have power to shape their experience together, especially if they take the time to have a few crucial conversations. In the spirit of palliation, here are a few things, as a physician, I wish I could share more often with patients and their caregivers.
They’re changing how we approach end-of-life care.
Facing our own mortality can be uncomfortable and, for some, distressing. But when we befriend death—when we approach death mindfully—its force doesn’t necessarily derail us in the same way.
An octogenarian expert on near-death experiences tells jokes as he waits to die.
Sean Illing and Frank Ostaseski discuss what Ostaseski has learned from the conversations he’s had with the dying.