Resources

Advanced Directives: What kind of medical care would you want if you were too ill or hurt to express your wishes? Advance directives are legal documents that allow you to spell out your decisions about end-of-life care ahead of time. They give you a way to tell your wishes to family, friends, and health care professionals and to avoid confusion later on.

Caring Connections, a program of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO), is a national consumer and community engagement initiative to improve care at the end of life. Since 2004 Caring Connections has provided more than 1.7 million advance directives to individuals free of charge. Caring Connections:

• Provides free resources and information to help people make decisions about end-of-life care and services before a crisis.
• Brings together community, state and national partners working to improve end-of-life care through a national campaign called It's About How You LIVE.

Compassion and Choices: For over thirty years we have reduced people’s suffering and given them some control in their final days – even when injury or illness takes their voice. We are experts in what it takes to die well.

The Remains by Mark Strand

This is a poem about aging and death.  It is poignant and evokes deep feeling.  The poet died in November 2014 and part of the poem was printed in his NY Times Obit.

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

Full Poem.

The New Old Age Blog

Paula Spann and Jane Gross, both reporters for the NY Times, run The New Old Age Blog.

"Thanks to the marvels of medical science, our parents are living longer than ever before. Most will spend years dependent on others for the most basic needs. That burden falls to their baby boomer children. The New Old Age blog explore this unprecedented intergenerational challenge."

This is a great resource.

Gabriel: A Poem

by Edward Hirsch

Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

 New Yorker Review. 

The Median Is Not The Message

by Steven J. Gould

From the Web: Stephen Jay Gould was an influential evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard University. He was the author of at least ten popular books on evolution, and science, including, among others, The Flamingo's Smile, The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life, and Full House.

Gould's The Median Isn't the Message is the wisest, most humane thing ever written about cancer and statistics. It is the antidote both to those who say that, "the statistics don't matter," and to those who have the unfortunate habit of pronouncing death sentences on patients who face a difficult prognosis. Anyone who researches the medical literature will confront the statistics for their disease. Anyone who reads this will be armed with reason and with hope.  

PDF of Gould's classic article

Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity. The book intends to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" Part One constitutes Frankl's analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory called logotherapy.

According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in the United States."At the time of the author's death in 1997, the book had sold over 10 million copies and had been translated into 24 languages.

Strangely, a full text PDF version is available online.   Part One is the most important section in my opinion.

When I Am Old

by Moyra Donaldson

I'll have dewlaps and a hump and say what all the time

in a cross voice: on every one of my bony crony fingers

a ring. My lips painted with a slash of bright fuchsia,

I'll drink margaritas by the tumbler full and if my dealer

dies before I do, I'll just have to look for younger suppliers.

I can't imagine not being interested in sex, but if it happens,

so be it, really I could do with a rest, complete hormonelessness.

I may forget who I am and how to find my way home, but be

patient, remember I've always been more than a little confused

and never did have much of a sense of direction. If I'm completely

demented, I'm depending on friends: you know who you are.

"When I Am Old" by Moyra Donaldson, from Selected Poems. © Liberties Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

Appeared on The Writer's Almanac, November 14, 2014 (if you click on the link, you can listen to it).

Wild Messengers

Jennifer Holland’s fine article in the November 1, 2014 NY Times, is a meditation on death and grieving.  It is a personal statement that speaks to many of us.

“About a decade ago, a brain tumor came to steal my mother away. It was diagnosed after she’d exhibited a series of strange behaviors (stranger than usual, I should say, as she was a quirky lady to begin with), and she very quickly went to a dark, quiet place that none of us could reach.

Escorting a loved one through her last days wrings your heart dry. You keep smiling, helping and hugging, knowing that soon enough you’ll be able to collapse and grieve. But until then, you stay strong."

Read  Wild Messengers.

The Death of Ivan Ilych

by Leo Tolstoy

This full text eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or full complete details are online at: http://gutenberg.net/license.

The Death of Ivan Ilych.

Tuesdays With Morrie

Lindsay Lincoln recommended this gem.  I read it when it first came out in 1997.  It is a memorable story that is speaks to the philosophy behind this course.

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

Newspaper sports columnist Mitch Albom recounts the time spent with his 78-year-old sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, at Brandeis University, who was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Albom, a former student of Schwartz, had not corresponded with him since attending his college classes 16 years earlier. The first three chapters incorporate an ambiguous introduction to the final conversation between Albom and Schwartz, a brief flashback to Albom's graduation, and an account of the events Albom experienced between graduation and the reunion with his professor. The name Morrie comes from its meaning in Hebrew (mori מורי), which means "my teacher."

Albom is a successful sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press despite his childhood dream of being a pianist. After seeing Schwartz on Nightline, Albom called Schwartz, who remembered his former pupil despite the lapse of 16 years. Albom was prompted to travel from Michigan to Massachusetts to visit Schwartz. A newspaper strike frees Albom to commute weekly, on Tuesdays, to visit with Schwartz. The resulting book is based on these fourteen Tuesdays they meet, supplemented with Schwartz's lectures and life experiences and interspersed with flashbacks and allusions to contemporary events.

When We Accept What Is

my sweet sweet Andrea

there was a lesson

to be learned

by your loss

my little baby girl

who died in your isolette

as if it were a manger

and that is not to take for granted

who I have birthed into this world

your brother who came

a year later

upon whom I bestow

all of my devotion

breaking the cycle

of harm imposed

by abusive parents

generations of them

all that is required

of motherhood

you have taught me

is to love our offspring

shower them with care

be blessed in our sons and daughters

these are the gifts

scattered beneath tragedy

waiting to be found

when we accept what is

this gold filament of grief

Deborah Golden Alecson

September 16, 2014

I Can't Go On. I Must Go On"

The title is a phrase from Samuel Beckett that appears in Paul Kalanithi's essay in the NY Times Sunday Review (Sunday, January 24, 2014): "How Long Have I Got Left?"

Kalanithi, who recently completed a neurosurgical residency at Stanford Medical Center, is used to looking at CT scans of countless patients. What he's not used to, is looking at his own, but that's what he did last year. His CT scan showed that at age 36 and never having smoked a day in his life, he had stage four lung cancer. "When I first saw my scan, I thought I didn't have very long for this world," Dr. Kalanithi said.

This NY Times reflective piece will give you much to think about.

Graphic from NY Times Essay