When I told her about my word project, she thought for a minute and decided it really wasn’t for her. She wasn’t feeling very well. Her liver was getting bigger, and it was pressing on her other organs, making her very uncomfortable. I asked how long she had been sick. She said her breast cancer had first shown up 15 years ago. She was sad to say it had just returned, and it was now in many other parts of her body, as well. She wasn’t afraid to die, and she sort of wished th

I bet this story isn’t going where you think it might. Seeing the word God inside a big heart on a blog about grief and death makes an obvious kind of sense, doesn’t it? Dying patients do tend to grow in their faith as life draws to a close. And to some extent, that is what this story is about. But there’s more to it than that, and I hope you’ll be as moved as I was by the way this one ends. The patient was a clear-eyed, clear-skinned, clearly tired man in his early 80s. He s

The first thing I see when I walk into a room on the hospice floor is not normally a bassinet sitting at the foot of a patient’s bed, but that’s how this story begins. A stuffed animal is perched in the patient’s lap, where she sits up in bed looking like a beautiful 40-something biker chick whose ride has mistakenly landed her here. A tattoo made of words, rendered in simple calligraphy, graces her right foot. Her coal black hair is stylishly short and shiny as patent leathe

I met with two clients last week; both of them women in their late 50s who are in the final stages of cancer. Both are confined to bed. Both are grappling with the nearness of death. And each with a different perspective, but with a common theme that I found compelling. My job is to give people a creative way of processing what’s going on for them when we meet. The opening this gives them to express a personal truth is a gift they sometimes don’t get in any other way. Especia