We found that proper preparation can ease the pain of losing a spouse. We've identified the "Not Top Ten" ways to prepare for widowhood, highlighting the importance of planning for...
Explore a day in the life of a hospice social worker as they navigate interdisciplinary meetings, family consultations, and patient care. The role involves addressing social factors, anticipatory grief, and...
In my work with family caregivers, I use the "externalizing the problem" technique from narrative therapy, which involves seeing the issue as separate from the individual. For example, Bob, who...
Written by Guest Author: Jude Mannion Eulogies can balance heartfelt tribute with humor, celebrating a person's life by sharing funny stories and fond memories. Humor helps lift spirits amidst grief,...
Written by Su Park It was a couple of days before Christmas in 2019. Dad called to tell me that Mom had been diagnosed with cancer. My heart sank and...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW My mother-in-law Kay died in 2020, three months after a Pancreatic Cancer diagnosis. Less than a month before her death, she decided to host...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW "Eye contact is more intimate than words will ever be." -Poets Cafe When sitting with someone who is seriously ill or dying, oftentimes they are...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW It’s not always easy to ask difficult questions, even if it’s your job to do so.It’s one of my responsibilities, as the hospice social worker, to...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW Completing your advance directive and living will is important. Yet, often, that’s all that happens. It's common for the person to complete these documents and tuck...
There is a lot of misinformation and misconceptions about hospice, which leads to people underutilizing the support that is available to them. Below are some common myths about hospice. ...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW I was visiting a hospice patient who lived alone and had very few people in her life. She was relatively young to be on hospice. When...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW Gender-affirming end-of-life care is a basic human right. It is the responsibility of each end-of-life provider to educate ourselves on how to care for transgender individuals....
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW People often choose their healthcare surrogate because of the relationship alone (spouse, child, etc).Before making your decision, we encourage you to consider a few factors:Openness in...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW There are many practical ways to support a friend that is grieving; grocery shopping, dropping off a meal, watching their children. These helpful tasks are appreciated...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW “Every morning, I go into my mom’s room and I can feel my heart racing. She sleeps with her mouth open, and many mornings she looks...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW Not long ago, I had a conversation with the daughter of a hospice patient who was upset.She asked, “Why didn’t my mom’s doctor tell us about...
grieving while a person is still living, over the course of the disease progression. There is so much grief in dementia. We grieve the losses. We grieve the future. We grieve...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW We live in a part of Los Angeles where the top Aerospace companies are located.This means that the hospice provider that I work for has a...
By Lisa Pahl, LCSW Over the years, I have worked with countless individuals who live with a Dementia diagnosis. Within hospice, some people’s terminal diagnosis is Dementia (and it’s very...
When talking about advance care planning, disposition options, and getting your affairs in order, people will tell me, “I don’t care what happens when I die, I will be dead.”My...
Recently, the spouse of a new hospice patient shared with me that she felt a bit overwhelmed by all of the calls she was receiving from the hospice team. While...
While we all innately know that connection is not severed with death, we grieve death as an ending, a grand finale to this thing we call life. As a society...
Former President, Jimmy Carter has now been on hospice five months, which begs the question, “How long can someone be receiving hospice services for?” For an individual to begin to...
“I realized in that moment, that I needed to stop thinking about what I want, which was every last second with my mom, and start thinking about what she wanted....
I’ve had the privilege of mentoring and supervising MSW interns this year at my hospice job. I’ve been supervising interns for many years and find it to be an...
The second to last episode of the series Million Little Things showed the challenges that people with a terminal diagnosis (and those that love them) experience at the end of...
“Frank” was pissed off when I met him. He wasn’t afraid to talk about it, either. He was upset that he felt like everyone was trying to protect him from...
When someone lives far beyond the prognosis that has been given, for reasons often unknown to healthcare professionals, it would seem that they would only be feeling happy with the...
“If I was healthy, there’s no way I would want to die. But this, how I’m living, it’s exhausting. I’m okay if death sneaks in one night to rescue me...
I had a Hospice patient “Mary” that I was seeing weekly for emotional support. Initially, she was living alone and fiercely independent, as many people are. Each week, she was...
When I began caregiving for my mother-in-law, I came in with an agenda. Over the course of her illness, I understood that I had to put aside my idealized version...
Guest Blogger Katey Houston of Return Home shares the ins and outs of an alternative to burial and cremation. Human composting, sometimes called Natural Organic Reduction, is an age-old science optimized to...
