I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. According to hospice workers, that is the #1 regret of the dying. I was reminded of this recently, when I walked into the room of a patient who was upset because his family wanted him to have a risky surgery that offered no real promise of success. He had spent too many hours on the operating table in recent years, and he just didn’t have it in him to undergo one more. When I asked h

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

There is no more important time to know (or discover) what you really believe about life and death than when you’re struggling to come through the grief of losing someone important to you. The emotional loss is heartbreaking, and that is the part they refer to when they say that time heals all wounds. And they’re right - it really does. But your beliefs about life and death can either liberate you from grief or keep you stuck there. And when you don’t know what you believe, t

When the nurse told me there was a room she’d like me to visit, she said the patient was on hospice care and that her daughters were not handling it very well. A mother was dying and her daughters were falling apart. I was intimately familiar with this scene. The patient had cancer. She was nearing death. She was nearly comatose. Her hair was nearly gone and her skin was nearly perfect. This was nearly the exact scenario I had lived through 20 years ago. Big deep breath. I to

Most people are familiar with the 5 stages of grief that Elisabeth Kugler-Ross defined in her groundbreaking book, “On Death and Dying.” This information has helped countless people understand at least some of what they were experiencing in the aftermath of a difficult loss. Grief, like parenting, was sorely lacking a manual at the time she laid out these 5 concepts, and the world has been grateful ever since. I remember referring to them when my time came to experience grief

One of the many things Invisible Ink was designed to do is help people create a bridge between themselves and their loved ones who have died. I think it is working, because I hear all the time that this process has given participants a greater sense of connection with the person they have lost. That is a hard concept for some people to think about. We have been taught forever that ‘reality’ exists only in the things we can see. Those who come into my program with doubts find

People have been dying since the beginning of our time on earth. And even though we seem to finally be addressing this situation a little more openly these days, there is still a disconnect between what we’ve been taught about death and what we experience when it actually happens to someone we love. I don’t remember being taught that once someone dies there is no way to interact with them anymore, but that is definitely what I grew up believing. I think most people did. But i