It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
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These stories are not for everyone, but they are topics that the author believes shouldn’t remain in the silence.
End-of-life conversations can ease suffering for families, not just patients. You can start these conversations simply, like saying, “I need to think about the future. Can you help me?”
When sickness and death strike, sometimes guidance from the past offers the clearest path forward.
When done right, hospice offers Medicare beneficiaries an intimate, holistic and vital service. But sometimes pinpointing what constitutes a “good death” is nearly as difficult as determining what makes a good life, and families do not always realize when hospice is failing them.
“In people’s imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality” … or does it?
It is primarily through having places to “story” that people have the opportunity to try to make sense of the senseless, to embrace what needs to be embraced, and to reveal that the human spirit prevails.
VSED might not be for everyone, but it is the only chance for some to experience an end to unbearable suffering. Done with careful preparation, medical support, and compassionate caregiving, VSED offers a natural end to life.
In 2019, three community women asked to meet with me about a compelling community education concern. The spouses of these women had all struggled to use the VSED end-of-life option because our county’s only hospital, and associated hospice program, had religious affiliations and, therefore, was unable to support VSED.
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