“Our job, as mature adults, is to hold our grief in one hand and our gratitude in the other, and to allow ourselves to be stretched large.” --Francis Weller It was Labor Day when I got my first Monday-morning “Wake Up” email from my friend and fellow-author Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo. She sends out her email “poke” every Monday, and each [...]
“Society should do a better job teaching people how to act – and not act – around a dying person.” (Actual quote from a dying woman) Surely, everyone who visits a terminally ill loved one has good intentions. I have to believe that most visitors want to provide comfort and companionship. Whether they are looking for a chance to offer [...]
How did you experience death for the first time? Was it the traumatic death of a pet or did you lose a beloved grandparent? Maybe a kindergarten classmate just disappeared one day and nobody would answer your questions about where they went or what happened. Or maybe the death you experienced was not so emotionally intense: perhaps you found a [...]
To my readers: Many people have asked me whether a death doula could help them access medical aid in dying in Colorado. Since I didn’t know the answer to that question, I invited a death doula to write a guest post. I am grateful to Vanessa Johnston for agreeing to educate us! Joanne By Vanessa Johnston Denver EOL Doula, LLC [...]
I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Jean Abbott, a retired physician, ethicist and hospice advocate about the concept of “death with dignity.” As a result of that conversation, I invited her to be a guest blogger so she could share her thoughts directly with you. Leave a comment, below, to tell me what you think about the subject. What [...]
In the US, we struggle, state by state, to get medical aid in dying laws passed, while in Canada, the whole country was approved at once in June 2016, through a ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court that required the Parliament of Canada to change the country’s laws to give dying people more control over how their lives end. It [...]
In an Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Denver Post (May 22, 2022), columnist Krista Kafer pushed a couple of my buttons. Those of you who have read my book or followed this blog from the beginning, know how much I dislike the terms “doctor-assisted suicide” and “physician-assisted suicide” when they are used to describe medical aid in dying. If you read [...]
The sheriff stood on my front porch with a woman who was wearing fancy clothes -- her stylish boots had high heels, and she wore a colorful silk scarf around her neck -- obviously not clothes an on-duty female sheriff would wear. Before the sheriff could even open his mouth, my brain did a quick assessment: The sheriff must be [...]
When Amy Bloom’s new book, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, was hitting the shelves at bookstores nationwide, I had just finalized corrections on my memoir’s final formatted pages. I had preordered Bloom’s book as soon as I became aware of it in January, but I had to wait until early March for my local bookstore to deliver [...]
For two decades, Belgium law has permitted euthanasia. Euthanasia is similar to medical aid in dying, with one big caveat: US medical aid-in-dying laws require people to self-administer the life-ending drugs, while laws in Belgium permit a doctor to administer the life-ending drug. The hands-on administration of the drug by a physician is what differentiates the death as euthanasia. In [...]