| Title |
Type |
Description |
Tags |
| Alison's Gift by Pat Hogan |
 |
"Alison's Gift is the true story of Alison Sanders' life and death-a story that has touched all of America. This is Alison's story and how her life found its way into millions of homes.
Alison's Gift is the triumph of love over life-ending experience. Along with Alison, meet real-life heroes who live through their greatest fears in a journey of loss, grief, and the rekindling of hope. This story chronicles Alison's life and death, her family's experience and her many legacies.
Alison, a vibrant child, had a mission in life to help others. In unique ways, both seen and unseen, her purpose lives on. Her fearlessness, compassion, and leadership qualities transformed her community in life and have reverberated throughout the country in her death. Alison's life was cut short by an air bag in a low-speed automobile collision. Meet Alison's father: although emotionally scarred by his loss, he starts a one-man crusade, forcing the auto industry to adopt safer air bag systems for our children. |
|
| Dying Wish by Karen vanVuuren |
|
Retired surgeon, Michael Miller, is dying of end-stage cancer and is determined to avoid the hospital at all costs. He's researched the dying process and believes that stopping eating and drinking will ease his suffering and result in a peaceful, more natural death. During his fast, Michael suffers neither thirst nor hunger. Buoyed by the legacy of this film, he enjoys a last meal, surrounds himself with art and music, and takes leave of his family. |
|
| Facing Death – Confronting End-of-Life Choices by Frontline - PBS |
|
How far would you go to sustain the life of someone you love, or your own? When the moment comes and you're confronted with the prospect of "pulling the plug", do you know how you'll respond? Unfounded rumors of federal "death panels" grabbed headlines in the summer of 2010, but the real decisions of how we die - the questions that most of us prefer to put off - are being made quietly behind closed doors, increasingly on the floors of America's intensive care units. In this film, Frontline gains access to the ICU of one of New York's biggest hospitals to examine the complicated reality... Click here to visit the resource page. |
|
| Hard Choices For Loving People - by Hank Dunn |
|
This booklet was written to provide guidance to patients and their families who must face the "hard choices" as they receive and participate in healthcare. It looks at questions like "Shall resuscitation be attempted", "Shall artificial nutrition and hydration be utilized?", "Should a nursing home resident or someone ill at home be hospitalized?", "Is it time to shift the treatment goal from cure to hospice or comfort care only?". This is all looked at with a compassionate and loving view, and yet is clear and to-the-point. |
|
| Knocking on Heaven's Door by Katy Butler |
|
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.
|
|
| Natural Transitions Magazine |
|
NATURAL TRANSITIONS MAGAZINE is the ONLY magazine on CONSCIOUS, HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO END OF LIFE that’s also a forum for professional end-of-life caregivers and families with loved-ones facing end-of-life transition. We are a vehicle for the alternative death care Movement. Click here to visit the resource page. |
|
| On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross |
|
This is a classic book. "Dr Ross projects her warm understanding, sophistication, and sensitivity into every page...an excellent book on the management of the terminally ill...offers hope for the understanding of uman strengths and weaknesses experienced during a very difficult time". |
|
| The End of Life Advisor - by S Dolan & A Vizzard |
|
In this simple guide, you’ll find both practical step-by-step advice and compassionate, heartfelt guidance to dramatically improve the last days of life. Written by a mother-daughter team of hospice volunteers with experience in nursing, law, and psychology, The End-of-Life Advisor will show you the remarkable benefits of hospice care.
If you’re a healthcare or legal professional, you’ll discover the important ways you can advise your patients and clients. If you’re caring for a loved one, you’ll learn how you can help make their last days much more comfortable. If you’re planning for yourself, you’ll understand the decisions you need to make now – so you can find greater peace down the road. |
|
| The Most Excellent Dying of Theodore Jack Heckelman by Nancy Poer |
|
When faced with cancer, Jack made a decision to die with gratitude and consciousness. Here, holding his beloved Pooh bear as a child, he could hardly have known the rich, fulfilling life and death that was to come. A communications engineer, he lived all over the world and was deeply committed to raising awareness of the global needs for social justice and caring for the earth. He was a leader in working for the Peace Academy and Earth Charter. |
|
| The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's Final Chapter- by David Kessler |
|
In gentle, compassionate language, this book helps us through the last chapter of our lives. The author has identified key areas of concern: the need to be treated as a living human being, the need for hope, the need to express emotions, the need to participate in care, the need for honesty, the need for spirituality, and the need to be free of physical pain. Examining the physical and emotional experiences of life-challenging illnesses, Kessler provides a vocabulary for family members and for the dying that allows them to communicate with doctors, with hospital staff, and with one another, and—at a time when the right words are exceedingly difficult to find—he helps readers find a way to say good-bye. Using comforting and touching stories, he provides information to help us meet the needs of a loved one at this important time in our lives. |
|
| The Ultimate End-of-Life Plan by Katy Butler |
|
Good article in Wall Street Journal - Sept 6, 2013. How one woman fought the medical establishment and avoided what most Americans fear: prolonged, plugged-in suffering. About the author's mother who chose to forego surgery and other life-extending medical interventions. The article looks at those types of decisions and the impact they have on the dying person as well as the family members. Click here to visit the resource page. |
|
| The Unexpected Caregiver by Kari Berit |
|
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". |
|
| Whose Life is it Anyway? - stars Richard Dreyfus |
|
Ken Harrison is an artist that makes sculptures. One day he is involved in a car accident, and is paralyzed from his neck. All he can do is talk, and he wants to die. In hospital he make friends with some of the staff, and they support him when he goes to trial to be allowed to die. |
|
| Wit - Starring Emma Thompson - directed by Mike Nichols |
|
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature known for her intense knowledge of metaphysical poetry, especially the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Her life takes a turn when she is diagnosed with metastatic Stage IV ovarian cancer. Oncologist Harvey Kelekian prescribes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease, and as she suffers through the various side-effects (such as fever, chills, vomiting, and abdominal pain), she attempts to put everything in perspective. The story periodically flashes back to previous moments in her life, including her childhood, her graduate school studies, and her career prior to her diagnosis. During the course of the film, she continually breaks the fourth wall by looking into the camera and expressing her feelings. |
|