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| End Of Life - Helping With Comfort and Care - National Institutes of Health |
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This is a link to a very useful online booklet which is loaded with all kinds of resource links. If this link does not work, go to www.nia.nih.gov and get to it that way. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| End of Life Article by Clay Evans, Part 1 of 3 parts Boulder Daily Camera columnist |
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Good article - this is the first of a series of 3 articles, mainly dealing with advanced directives and the issues that occur when they are not followed. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| End of Life Article by Clay Evans, Part 2 of 3 parts Boulder Daily Camera columnist |
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2nd in a series of 3 articles on Death and Dying. This part covers more detail about advance directives. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Final Gifts by M Callanan & P Kelley |
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For more than a decade the authors, hospice nurses, have tended the terminally ill. Now, in this moving and compassionate book, they share their intimate experiences with patients at the edge of life. Through these stories, you'll come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; you'll gain new insight into the leave-taking process; and in the end you'll discover the gifts of wisdom, faith, and love that the dying leave for us to share. |
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| Help Me Live - 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know - by Lori Hope |
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We want nothing more than to offer comfort and support, and foster hope. But we don’t always know how—and may feel uncomfortable asking. Following her own treatment for cancer, Lori Hope created a survey for cancer survivors addressing issues they wanted their families, friends, and caregivers to understand. The results of the newly expanded survey are presented with honesty, insight, and humor, and complemented by scores of compelling personal stories from survivors of diverse ages and backgrounds. If you are a caregiver, Help Me Live will help you communicate more effectively and respond more compassionately. And if you are a survivor, it will help you feel validated, empowered, and, ultimately, hopeful. |
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| How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death |
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Interesting NY Times article on some promising research on psychedelics in treating dying persons who might be dealing with anxiety or depression. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Knocking on Heaven's Door by Katy Butler |
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In this visionary memoir, based on a groundbreaking New York Times Magazine story, award-winning journalist Katy Butler ponders her parents’ desires for “Good Deaths” and the forces within medicine that stood in the way.
Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her vigorous and self-reliant parents when the call came: a crippling stroke had left her proud seventy-nine-year-old father unable to fasten a belt or complete a sentence. Tragedy at first drew the family closer: her mother devoted herself to caregiving, and Butler joined the twenty-four million Americans helping shepherd parents through their final declines.
Then doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, keeping his heart going but doing nothing to prevent his six-year slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he told his exhausted wife, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter were forced to confront a series of wrenching moral questions. When does death stop being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?”
When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a prolonged and agonizing death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother took another path. Faced with her own grave illness, she rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death head-on.
With a reporter’s skill and a daughter’s love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of medicine. Her provocative thesis is that modern medicine, in its pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents.
This revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that dying has become. And it chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a new movement trying to reclaim the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. It will inspire the difficult conversations we need to have with loved ones as it illuminates the path to a better way of death.
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| Passages in Caregiving by Gail Sheehy |
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Caring for a loved one with a chronic illness -- a parent, partner, sibling or child -- is a role no one aspires to but many of us will take on.
In her superb new book, "Passages in Caregiving," Gail Sheehy writes that someone is serving as an unpaid family caregiver in almost one-third of American households. It's a job that lasts an average of five years.
"Nobody briefs us on all the services we are expected to perform when we take on this role," she writes.
That statement is no longer true, for "Passages in Caregiving" -- written from Sheehy's personal experience supplemented by a generous dose of reporting -- does it well. Her book outlines the road that awaits caregivers and gives practical advice to help them on the journey. It's an ambitious and readable blend of memoir, reportage, consumer advice, pep talk and love story. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Share the Care organization |
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This is the organization that promotes and distributes the book "Share the Care". It is a resource that is geared specifically for setting up a care giver group. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| The True Work of Dying by J Bernard & M Schneider |
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This groundbreaking, holistic guide presents rare insights and reassuring practical advice on how to navigate the final weeks before death - physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Drawing on the rich and poignant experiences of their hospice patients, the authors show us that when the dying and their caregivers commit themselves to the true emotional and spiritual work of dying, healing is virtually inevitable, though it often comes in unexpected forms. |
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| The Unexpected Caregiver by Kari Berit |
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As their parents grow older, growing numbers of Baby Boomers find themselves thrust into a caregiver role, often with little warning or preparation. In a sense, they must function somewhat like activity directors in senior-care facilities, helping mom and dad come to terms with both day-to-day concerns and longer-term issues. Kari Berit brings extensive professional and personal insights to this subject. This book is a "splendid treasure chest of practical ideas that will help ease the stress of caring across generations". |
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| The Year of Magical Thinking - by Joan Didion |
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The book recounts Didion's experiences of grief after her husband's death of a cardiac arrest in their New York apartment. Days before his death, their daughter was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died. The narrative structure of the book follows Didion's re-living and re-analysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for her daughter. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book. |
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| What to say to someone who is sick |
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Good NY Times article how to be and communicate with someone who is sick or dying Click here to visit the resource page. |
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