A Hospice Nurse on Embracing the Grace of Dying

From an interview with hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos in the New York Times:

What should more people know about death?

I think they should know what they want. I’ve been in more situations than you could imagine where people just don’t know. Do they want to be in a nursing home at the end or at home? Organ donation? Do you want to be buried or cremated? The issue is a little deeper here: Someone gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, and we have a culture where you have to “fight.” That’s the terminology we use: “Fight against it.” So the family won’t say, “Do you want to be buried or cremated?” because those are not fighting words. I have had situations where someone has had terminal cancer for three years, and they die, and I say: “Do they want to be buried or cremated? Because I’ve told the funeral home I’d call.” And the family goes, “I don’t know what they wanted.” I’m like, We’ve known about this for three years! But no one wants to say: “You are going to die. What do you want us to do?” It’s against that culture of “You’re going to beat this.”

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Do these experiences feel religious to you?

No, and that was one of the most convincing things for me. It does not matter what their background is — if they believe in nothing, if they are the most religious person, if they grew up in a different country, rich or poor. They all tell me the same things. And it’s not like a dream, which is what I think a lot of people think it is. Like, Oh, I went to sleep, and I had a dream. What it is instead is this overwhelming sense of peace. People feel this peace, and they will talk to me, just like you and I are talking, and then they will also talk to their deceased loved ones. I see that over and over again: They are not confused; there’s no change in their medications. Other hospice nurses, people who have been doing this longer than me, or physicians, we all believe in this.

A Parent Describes Grief

With the death of our eldest child, I had no framework on how to proceed through my own mental health journey. People don’t talk about such things. As a television producer, I found myself thinking about our responsibility in telling stories around grief and mental health. Can we as an industry tell those stories accurately and effectively? ... My experience is that the topics of death, dying and grief are quite taboo – even though most will experience it. If you love someone, you will grieve. And anyone who has been there will tell you that grief can annihilate your mental health like a linebacker taking down a fourth-string quarterback. ... I will walk with grief the rest of my days, but now I know how to do it safely. Grief and mental health are inextricable. In our industry of telling stories, we cannot ignore this topic that affects us all. I feel so grateful that I got to tell the story responsibly… and in the end, we even got to laugh. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’ Producer on How She Learned to Handle Grief