By BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger — 2019
Prognoses are more of an art than a science. Maybe it’s better not to know.
Read on www.nytimes.com
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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.
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out—a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
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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.
I considered those rich periods of life lost to anxiety and compulsive coping behavior. At the end of our life would we be inclined to say, “if I knew it was going to end, I could have enjoyed it?”
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, counselors and meditation teachers, sit down with psychotherapist Barbara Platek to speak about easing the transition from life to death.
Every day, I get closer to the brink of everything. We’re all headed that way, of course, even when we’re young, though most of us are too busy with Important Matters to ponder our mortality.
“Letting go is also the practice of letting in, letting your teacher be alive in you,” says a senior disciple of the celebrity Buddhist monk and author.