By Jane E. Brody — 2007
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.”
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CLEAR ALL
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.
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.