Medical and Legal End of Life Care Talk With Your Doctor - AARP

This article is a good, clear, comprehensive outline of the questions you will need to answer and the documents you will need for an end of life talk with your doctor, including an advanced directive and health care proxy.

"If your doctor doesn't initiate an end-of-life talk with you, here are some ways to get one started and some of the topics you should cover. In addition, there are important legal documents that you will need to make your decisions binding."

Medical and Legal End of Life Care Talk With Your Doctor - AARP:

Going green in life and deathThe Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying | The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

"There’s a quiet revolution under way in the American death industry, moving towards a future in which natural composting, water cremation and even a so-called ‘mushroom death suit’ might be as socially acceptable as conventional coffins and cremation. Current burial practices pose significant environmental risks. To counter their effects, a group of funeral professionals, artists and academics have started proposing eco-friendly alternatives. But the endeavor requires engaging a normally death-phobic public in a wider discussion about dying as a natural process — something rebel mortician Caitlin Doughtystrives to do. Doughty, a Los Angeles undertaker with a self-confessed “proclivity toward the macabre,” is the founder of the aforementioned group, which she calls The Order of the Good Death. It’s about trying to lift the “veil of secrecy and shame cloaking death,” she writes in her best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. “A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death,” she says. For her next book, Doughty is exploring the idea of eco-friendly death practices because she believes current practices are unsustainable. “This is about the future of the dead body and its disposition,” she says."

Going green in life and deathThe Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying | The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

What Luck Means Now -- Joyce Maynard

"Luck" means something different when severe illness eliminates so many choices and opportunities. Joyce Maynard writes poignantly about waiting for news of her husband's surgery.

I arrived a little after 6 a.m., after kissing my husband goodbye before they wheeled him into surgery. The surgery is expected to take 12 hours, though somewhere around Hour 3 the surgeon will have gotten to the place in Jim’s abdomen where he can see the tumor, known to us only as an innocuous-looking gray area on Jim’s CT scans. Sometimes this turns out to be the moment when the surgeon discovers the tumor is not operable after all, in which case they stitch everything up and say, “We tried.”

The tumor in question (I haven’t allowed myself to call it “Jim’s tumor”; I don’t want to see him take ownership) is 2.5 centimeters in diameter and located in the head of Jim’s pancreas. For my husband to survive — to have a shot at survival — this tumor must come out.

The operation calls for the removal of part of Jim’s pancreas, his gall bladder, his duodenum and parts of his small intestine and stomach. “Picture gutting a fish,” Jim, a fly fisherman, said to a friend. “That’s roughly the idea.”

It’s odd to say of an operation like this that a person is lucky to be receiving it, but Jim and I do feel lucky. Seven months earlier, when we went to the doctor, anticipating gallstones, we learned the tumor was probably inoperable.

“There’s a surgery that gives you a shot,” Jim’s doctor told us. (A shot. Just that. But suddenly a shot was everything.) “It’s called the Whipple Procedure.”

From that moment, our focus had become shrinking the tumor to where Jim could get the Whipple. And after eight rounds of chemotherapy and two of radiation, the day has come.

Atul Gawande’s 5 Questions to Ask at Life’s End – Next Avenue

"We need to know:   1. What is your understanding of where you are and of your illness? 2. Your fears or worries for the future 3. Your goals and priorities 4. What outcomes are unacceptable to you? What are you willing to sacrifice and not? And later, 5. What would a good day look like?   Asking these allows everybody to understand what the goal really is — what are you really fighting for? It’s for a life that contains certain things."

Atul Gawande’s 5 Questions to Ask at Life’s End – Next Avenue

A Neighbor's Empathy Makes The Pain Of Grief Bearable : Shots - Health News : NPR

"[E]mpathy is pain's best antidote. It is, says Robert Burton in his astonishing Anatomy of Melancholy, "as fire in Winter, shade in Summer, as sleep on the grass to them that are weary, meat and drink to him that is hungry or athirst." The pain doesn't go away; but somehow or other, empathy gives the pain meaning, and pain-with-meaning is bearable. I don't actually know how to say what the effect of empathy is, I can only say what it's like. Like magic."

A Neighbor's Empathy Makes The Pain Of Grief Bearable

Royal College of Art students collaborate with London hospice to 're-style' the experience of death | Features | Lifestyle | The Independent

Designing a welcoming, supportive environment for those who have little time and want to make the most of it as comfortably as possible.

"The biggest shocker for me was the significance of distraction," Jones says. "We couldn't figure out why patients were constantly gathering around a television to watch game shows. By talking to them, we discovered that the distraction it offered was the source of its appeal. When we realised this, we began exploring options for other forms of distraction and interaction."

Royal College of Art students collaborate with London hospice to 're-style' the experience of death | Features | Lifestyle | The Independent:

Complicated Grief: Reframing the Way We Think About Love and Loss

"Grief is both a universal experience and a unique one. Like the love that spawns it, grief is unique to each bereaved person.

P.J.’s family appear to be solidly grounded in a comforting belief system and enveloped in a supportive secular and spiritual community. They still seem able to envision a meaningful life.

But many bereaved people feel deeply confused, emotionally unsettled, and profoundly isolated in the acute aftermath of a loss. The isolation and confusion is intensified by our cultural aversion to conversation about loss and death and by uncertainties about what to expect in grief.

I believe that grief is neither a brief reaction to loss that can and should be quickly resolved, nor is it so completely unique that any form it takes should be welcomed and validated as suggested by the maxim that everyone grieves in their own way.

Scientists who study close relationships define them as providing comfort during times of trouble and encouragement during times of learning, taking risks, and performing. There is a lot of evidence that we are biologically predisposed to seek, form, and maintain such relationships and to adjust to their loss.

Grief is the response to loss but it is not one thing. It is different for different people and for the same person over time. Grief entails a changing array of thoughts feelings and behaviors evoked by the loss. Emotions often surge in ways that can feel unfamiliar, unpredictable, and confusing, As C.S. Lewis famously said, “No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.” "

Complicated Grief: Reframing the Way We Think About Love and Loss - Pacific Standard