The Suicide Tourist

This is a a portrait of the final days of an American with ALS who pursues physician-assisted suicide in the one place where it's legal for foreigners to come to end their lives: Switzerland. With unique access to Dignitas, the Swiss nonprofit that has helped more than 1,000 people die since 1998, The Suicide Tourist follows Craig Ewert as he debates the morality -- and confronts the reality -- of choosing to die before his disease further ravages his body, and he loses the option to die without unbearable suffering.

You Tube link to the PBS/Frontline The Suicide Tourist (First aired in 2007, 52 minutes)

Synopsis.

Miscellaneous Cartoons

The Threshold: A Hospice Nurse's Encounters

by Larissa MacFarquhar

The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016

The Threshold is a longish and moving piece follows a hospice nurse on her rounds in Brooklyn.  It is worth a close reading.  Excerpts follow:

The first modern hospice was founded in 1967, in London, by Cicely Saunders, who was both a doctor and a social worker: she wanted to offer homelike care that aimed to provide comfort and serenity rather than to prolong life.  Today roughly twice as many people in America die in hospice as die in hospital.

Hospice believes in caring not only for the patient but also for the family, and tries to address psychological and spiritual needs as well as physical ones.

Whenever Heather entered a patient’s home for the first time, she knew that she was walking into a long, long, complicated story that she understood nothing about, a story that was just then reaching its final crisis.  She wanted to care for her patients in a personal way, rather than racing from one task to another, one limb to the next—inserting an I.V. here, drawing blood there, scarcely noticing whose vein she was puncturing or whose arm she was holding.  She came to understand that touching itself was important, whether it healed or not; she had not realized this before she became a nurse.

Ars Moriendi in the 21st Century

Dr. Katherine McKenzie, an internist at Yale, describes how she and her family allowed her father to experience “a good death” based on an older philosophy called the “Art of Dying.  See “A Modern Ars Moriendi” (New England Journal of Medicine, June 2, 2016)

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes (2013)

On the most important level this a meditation on Barnes’ grief.  The chapter,

‘The Loss of Depth’, which comprises around half of the book’s length, is Barnes’ examination of his grief after the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh.  It is candid to the point that when he moots the idea of suicide he reveals his preferred method (‘a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife').

In ‘The Loss of Depth’ the love story is entwined in the narrative of grieving rather than parenthetically set aside, and entanglement this is the heart of the book.  There are many books in this genre, some on this blog.

Korean Funerary Portraits

There’s who you are, who you think you are and how you want to be remembered. For Koreans, funerary portraits, which honor the dead at funerals, symbolize all three.

This NY Times article sensitively addresses these portraits and gives a bit of background.  It also has a gallery of 20 such portraits.

Agnes Hwang, age 66, (by Juliana Sohn)

Shik Ja Hong, age 72. (by Juliana Sohn)

 

 

Coloring Your Way Through Grief

Deborah S. Derman, a professional grief counselor has suffered more than her fair share of grief. “The field of grief counseling sort of found me,” she said, “because I had such a long history of loss.”

Now, Dr. Derman has produced an intriguing new tool – an adult coloring book intended to help others “get through tough times.” Called “Colors of Loss and Healing,” the book consists of 35 pages of lavish illustrations to color, each relating to a word or phrase, like “one day at a time,” “bitter and sweet” and “resilience,” meant to evoke thoughts and feelings that can help to promote healing.

The book is meant to help people with losses of every kind, including illness, divorce, financial ruin, post-addiction — anything that might force people to redefine their identity.

Read Jane Broody’s excellent article in the March 17, 2016 NY Times: “Coloring Your Way Though Grief.”