The fact that art provides comfort and hope isn't often realized until it's happening, especially to someone lying in a hospital bed. She wasn’t feeling very well. Her liver was getting bigger, and it was pressing on her other organs, making her very uncomfortable. So when I told her about my word project, she thought for a minute and decided it really wasn’t for her. I asked how long she had been sick. She said her breast cancer had first shown up 15 years ago. She was sad t

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

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

He hovered around her, fluffing her pillows and clearing away her uneaten breakfast. He cheerfully reported all that he had accomplished so early in the day, and wondered what else he could do for her before taking off again into his busyness. And she lay there smiling, and dying. After he left, she continued talking to me about the meaning of her life. She didn’t need his help with that. She only needed from him what he had to give. The dance of life as death approaches is i

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