If you feel like there’s something out there that you’re supposed to be doing, if you have a passion for it, then stop wishing and just do it. –Wanda Sykes
People living deeply have no fear of death. –Anais Nin
Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live. –Natalie Babbitt
People familiar with the end of life choice movement may be familiar with the term “double effect” and all it entails. For those who are not educated in the more subtle areas of this Barbara Coombs Lee, the Executive Director of Compassion and Choices, has written an accessible article to explain it.
Barbara Coombs Lee, an American hero
Hawaii has become the fourth state in the union to allow death with dignity joining Oregon, Washington, and Montana in allowing people to have a say in their end of life choices. Here’s a timeline detailing the end of life choice movement in case you want additional background. There are many who have come to realize that it’s not quantity of life that matters but the quality of life, who want more say in their lives final chapter.
The blog Seven Ponds has a worthwhile round up of this latest state to work toward more end of life choice. You can click to the many links including a statement from Barbara Coombs Lee , from Compassion and Choices. Here is a section of Seven Pond’s website that details “end of life rights” that has plenty of resources for study.
If you want to know how your state does on palliative care here’s an interactive map that will give you the run down If you don’t like what you see, work to raise this grade by joining up with others to provide better end of life care.
Grand Canyon National Park
I was alerted to the documentary Consider the Conversationand that it would be shown on many public broadcasting stations. It was not going to be shown in my area and so I bought one to give to the local Compassion and Choices chapter to make available to their volunteers. It a terrific film and would make for great family viewing, here is a short but powerful three minute clip from YouTube that will give you a taste of the power of this film about a life passage rarely spoken of in our culture.
Seattle neurologist and neuro-oncologist Dr. Lynne P. Taylor has written a powerful piece in a professional publication about her work with the Washington State Death with Dignity Law.
Also worth reading is the New York Times article: Good Short Life by Dudley Clendinen.
Choosing When to Go, the article about Maine resident Norman Morse, is quite intelligent. It does incorrectly state that Oregon is the only state with a Death with Dignity Law that allows physician aid in dying, when so does Washington and Montana. The people of Maine had always been strongly independent and Morse states a strong case for why he should be able to end his life when he thinks it should be over stressing once again quality over quantity.
These videos and articles should be shared to make us all more comfortable with all parts of our lives even the end.
I've looked at clouds from both sides now...
Only 33% of Americans have made a traditional will. We don’t like to talk about our mortality and this inability to plan is very hard on those who are left to grieve.
According to writer Rob Walker there are over 300,000 people on Facebook world wide who will die in the coming year and it brings up what will happen to our digital entities when we die. Walker wrote about this in the New York Times Magazine, in an article entitled Cyberspace When You are Dead. Walker is featured on KQED‘s radio program “Forum” called Our Digital Afterlife with Nate Lustig, co-founder of Entrustet a company that allows you to designate who gets your passwords and what your digital wishes are when you have expired. A recent widow calls into the show with the tender quandary of when to take her deceased husband’s Facebook profile off-line, and tells how much it hurt her to alter her own profile, from married to widowed—these are part of out brave new world of cyber-identities.
For those of us with cherished family photos, in albums from our ancestors, the thought of what will happen to our family photos that on-line, who is going to get these passwords, and who will pay the nominal storage fee to access these gems is a new frontier. What about on-line entities on Facebook and things like Twitter etc?
Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. died last week. He was an activist and a diplomat and perhaps most thought of as the man who started the Peace Corps and served as the head from 1960-1966. Did you know he also started the Jobs Corps and Head Start? He served as ambassador in France in the late 1960s, he was married to Eunice Kennedy and was as a result an active part of the Kennedy clan. He was the president of the board of directors of the Special Olympics an organization founded by his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Sarg was an active attorney specializing in international law and foreign affairs. He was later in life disabled by cognitive impairment, his daughter Maria Shriver wrote a book about Alzheimer’s called What’s Happening to Grandpa? for children.
Since 1961, over 200,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps, serving in 139 countries. There is no way to discount the influence this had on how many lives in America and oversees. If you want a good read, here is a list of books by former Peace Corps volunteers, I’d recommend you start with Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen about Equador, and then read Under the Neem Tree by Susan Lowerre about her experiences in Senegal.
Thank you Sarg for everything you did, to make our country better, and for touching so many lives internationally.
Tug on Puget Sound
For a quirky selection, more off the beaten track, tune into the shorts on The Moth podcast, or Wisconsin Public Radio’s program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders. Both feature guests and topics sure to spark a new idea and teach you something you may never have considered. Host Jean Ferraca is smart and her book I Hear Voices is worth investigating.
Word people will enjoy Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac for a daily poem and run down of what went on each day in literary history, and you will laugh and learn listening to A Way with Words about the use of language, and origins of sayings (would I be do brave as to compare their humorously entertaining banter to Tom and Ray?).
Rarely does a day go by when I don’t listen to one of the programs offered by Tom Ashbrook’s On Point Radio, Diane Rehm Show on WAMU, or Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum.
NPR, who has generally become too mainstream for me does offers Science Friday as a separate feed, and for people interested in keeping up with technology how could you miss Internet Guru and highly entertaining Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy podcast?
Take a moment this week to try a new podcast, it will make your weekly housekeeping tasks that much more pleasant or help you stick to your exercise regime that much easily.
CJ's flowers
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.
-Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
The highest result of education is tolerance.
-Helen Keller (1880-1968)
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. -Gilda Radner (1946-1989)
Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn’t know a thing about life.
-Sue Monk Kidd (1948- )
After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.
-Ann Richards (1933-2006)
Puget Sound Sunset
Although we live in a death denying culture one of the nicest things that you can do is to complete this paperwork called PUTTING YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER that details your wishes upon death. Produced by the People’s Memorial Association, the oldest continually running funeral cooperative in the country, this details your most personal end of life wishes and details that your survivors will appreciate knowing. Please if you find this form helpful please take time to send them a small donation to keep their organization providing this information.
Years back a close friend of ours died. I had nagged my friends all to sign up with the local nonprofit funeral cooperative and what did we find? A filled out forms telling us what he hadn’t been able to tell us himself, his final wishes. We were obviously suffering a great loss but this forethought and consideration was such a gift to receive.
Funeral Consumer’s Alliance is a national organization that is a watch dog group over the funeral industry and their website has lots of helpful end of life information too. They keep a hawk’s eye on the ways the ever more corporate funeral world takes advantage of grieving families and works to support the various funeral cooperatives around the country many of which are run by dedicated volunteers.
boats in Italy
I used to have a co-worker who used this old adage often, and I couldn’t help but think of it when introducing this radio documentary from NPR station WBUR on Boston called Quality of Death: End of Life Care in America. It is worth a listen and this helpful website has information about the quality of care in various states and a list of links to more resources about end of life care.
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