The Doctors Said No to a DNR

From Pro Publica:

Does preserving organs for transplant make doctors reluctant to permit a do not resuscitate order?

There can be few greater points of contention between physicians and families, few so infused with emotion and anguish on both sides, than whether to resuscitate someone on the verge of death. Hospitals have been sued and nursing homes fined for resuscitating patients who had a DNR order on file. Or families may urge a medical team to initiate resuscitation that a physician believes is futile, or even torture, for a patient with a terminal diagnosis. The decision is inherently subjective, and ultimately, doctors are supposed to respect the wishes of patients — or, if they can’t speak for themselves, their health care proxy.

My Beautiful Death; An Artist Discovers That Her Materials Have Poisoned Her

Toronto-based sculptor Gillian Gensler writes about discovering that the shells she uses in her work have been toxic, including the statue she calls Adam:

I completed Adam in 2015. If I had left him unfinished, this all would have been for nothing. I often think of Beethoven, who suffered from lead poisoning; he lost his hearing and producing his work became an angry struggle. In the end, he had to create his music from the memory of sound. I was creating my art from the memory of joy. When I look at Adam, I feel grief—both for myself and our planet. But I also feel satisfaction because he is magnificent. That’s how I find my hope. I call him my beautiful death.

My Beautiful Death

Colbert and Cooper on Grief

“You wrote me a letter after my mom died,” he reminded Colbert. “In it you said, ‘I hope you find peace in your grief.’ One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how we don’t really talk about grief and loss. People are not comfortable talking about it. . . . And you’ve spoken very publicly about what you experienced as a kid — a lot of it I didn’t know. I think a lot of people don’t know. So if you don’t mind, I wanted to talk to you a little about it and sort of how it has shaped who you are now.


...

Colbert: You become a different person. . . . You kind of re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving world. . . . It became a very quiet house and very dark. And ordinary concerns of childhood suddenly kind of disappeared. . . . I had certainly a different point of view than the children around me.”

Stephen Colbert answering Anderson Cooper’s question about grief

End of Life University: Making Hard Times Less Hard for Others

Podcast: How to Make Difficult Times Better as a Death-Aware Person

5 tasks to make difficult times better:
Be willing to show up when things fall apart
Be a safe container
Be a deep listener
Be a truth-teller
Be a way-shower

What does it mean to create new life when one parent is dying?

Caitlin Gibson writes about the poignant choice to create new life when one parent has a terminal diagnosis:

Ben Boyer can still picture the expression on his wife’s face that night six years ago, as they talked over dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant in London. It had been four years since Xenia Trejo had been diagnosed, at the age of 33, with a malignant brain tumor that doctors said would eventually end her life. But as she sat across the table from Ben that evening, Xenia radiated joy. She felt strong, and after numerous rounds of treatment, her doctors had just told them that Xenia’s tumor was stable enough to do something she had long dreamed of: pursue a pregnancy. Now Xenia was asking Ben, What do you think? Should we try?

...

These are distinctly modern stories. For couples who confronted grim diagnoses before the turn of the millennium, the option to preserve their fertility was much harder to find and less likely to succeed. But the ability to freeze and test embryos improved dramatically in the early 2000s, bringing with it complex existential questions. What would it mean to have a baby in these circumstances for the parent who would die? For the parent who would live? For their child?

Dean -- A Movie with Demetri Martin and Kevin Kline About Loss

Washington Post: My terminally ill mother wanted to end her own life. What would it take to fulfill her last wish?

Tim Zimmermann writes about his mother's assisted death in Washington DC, the great difficulty they had in filling the prescription, and her determination to die on her own terms:

On a Sunday evening in July 2018, my 81-year-old mother raised a small red glass to her lips. In it was a mixture of water, grape juice and 10,000 milligrams of Seconal powder, a massively fatal dose of a barbiturate most commonly used for insomnia. She was sitting up in a hospital bed in her Washington, D.C., home, bathed in warm early evening light and wearing a thin white nightgown. She had spent the weekend calling close friends and loved ones to say goodbye, and chatting and passing time with me, my sister and all her grandchildren....According to the D.C. Department of Health, my mother was one of two D.C. residents to kill herself last year using the 2016 Death With Dignity Act. (A third, Mary Klein, the law’s most vocal citizen-advocate, also took her own life but for some reason does not show up in the department’s statistics.) The law, which allows terminally ill patients to end their lives with a fatal dose of drugs prescribed by a doctor, puts Washington at the leading edge of humane end-of-life options: Only nine states plus the District — and just a handful of countries — allow medical aid in dying.... As she approached her 80s she had already decided that, when the time came, whatever illness or decrepitude she might confront, she wanted to be master of her fate....There was no way she was going to let a disease dictate her fate, or try to hang on day after day while it slowly consumed her. “I want to be remembered as ‘Teeny full of life,’ not ‘Teeny the cancer patient,’ ” she told my sister Quinny.

We Don't Move On From Grief -- We Move Forward

From the author of No Happy Endings and host of the Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast

The (Planned) Death of a Champion

The New York Times reports on the scheduled death of Marieke Vervoort, a para-athlete, eleven years after initially preparing the paperwork.

[A]fter more than a decade of uncertainty and pain and joy, of opening her private life to friends and strangers and reporters, of inspiring others, of vexing them, of wishing for the end of her life and at the same time fearing it, Vervoort had invited her loved ones to her home for the most heart-wrenching of reasons:

In three days, she had an appointment to die....

There was, also, a faint feeling of uncertainty in the air — an unspoken question of whether this really was the end, a nanoscopic hope that it might not be. Almost three years had passed since two journalists from The New York Times — the photographer Lynsey Addario and I — began spending time with Vervoort to chronicle the end of her life, to observe a top athlete taking control of her destiny in an extraordinary fashion. Being around her during that time sometimes felt like one extended, indefinite goodbye.

She had come close to scheduling her euthanasia on multiple occasions, but had always switched course, found a reason to put it off. Something would come up. Conflicts would emerge. There would be another date to look forward to, another reason to live....

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said of her death. “Looking forward finally to rest my mind, finally have no pain.” She paused. “Everything I hate will be over.”

Elizabeth is Missing: Trailer | BBC Trailers

Edna St. Vincent Millay on What She Misses About Her Mother

The courage that my mother had
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

Doctors are torturing dementia patients at the end of their life. And it’s totally unnecessary.

From The Washington Post, a story by Geoffrey Hosta that is the opposite of the doctors' first imperative: first, do no harm.

I recently tortured an 88-year-old woman with advanced dementia. Her mind was gone. She didn’t know her own name. Like other advanced dementia patients, she suffered incontinence, aggression, immobility, unaddressed pain and more. Her quality of life was dismal.

Her family brought her to the hospital because she had a high fever and was more confused than usual. I knew that she was near her end.

I asked her daughter, son-in-law and grandson what I always ask families managing a relative’s final days: “Do you want us to do procedures that may well be painful and will not improve her quality of life? Or do you want us to let her go in peace?”

Dr, Hosta says most families choose the second option.