When someone we love dies, the essence of who they were becomes magnified. Every trait they had becomes the most special trait imaginable. We remember all the ways they made our lives better. Their vulnerabilities tear at our hearts, as the tender fragilities they were. But when we can finally commune with their memory as the imperfect person we knew them to be here on earth, we have found our healing. Because peace comes in the knowledge that they were always enough. And gra

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

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

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

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