Death and Life

The meaning of life is that it stops. One of the cards in The Death Deck asks if you would want to live forever if you could. Most people answer ...

Former President, Jimmy Carter has now been on hospice five months, which begs the question, “How long can someone be receiving hospice services f...

“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 wh...

  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 ...

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 their life.

“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 the fact that he was dying. “I know damn well that I’m dying.” He told me that he thought the doctors and other medical professionals that he encountered were “cowards” for not being direct with him.

When someone lives far beyond the prognosis that has been given, for reasons often unknown to healthcare professionals, it would seem that they wo...

“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...

I had a Hospice patient “Mary” that I was seeing weekly for emotional support. Initially, she was living alone and fiercely independent, as many ...

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 of what this “good death” was going to be. She wasn’t my project to have the most prepared ending ever. This was her dying journey, not mine. 

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 take human remains and gently transform them into rich, life-giving soil.

When someone dies, there's so much stuff to sort through. What to do with a half finished hand-crafted table left behind by a deceased grandpa? Guest Blogger Jerry Pahl tells the story of how he found a new purpose and home for Grandpa's table.