This article was written by Michael Lynch in honour of Robin Dempsey Lynch – October 5th 1941 to April 26th 2024. Nothing I can say or write will bring anything new to the billions of words written over the past many centuries about the evolution of life. This is the true story of a quiet, elegant, brave, compassionate, loving, beautiful,…
Following is the script from a School of Life YouTube video titled Reasons to Remember Death. The School of Life is a global organization helping people to lead more fulfilled lives through useful resources and tools. The fast-paced video is directed to those of us who are not actively dying. This is about death, our death, and how useful it…
Quadra island Way To Go works to integrate death as a natural part of community life by initiating conversations, providing education, and encouraging people to plan ahead on issues related to end-of-life, and empowering, guiding, and supporting the practice and process of caring for our own dead and dying, in community. Way To Go began on Quadra in 2017, inspired…
A death doula is a non-medical person trained to care for someone holistically (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually) at the end-of-life. They recognize death as a natural, accepted, and honoured part of life. Death doulas are also known as end-of-life coaches, transition guides, and end-of-life doulas. Although we’ve been dying for thousands of years, it is only in the last…
Written by Dr. Sarah Kerr, PhD, The Centre for Sacred Deathcare https://sacreddeathcare.com/ When someone dies, the first thing to do is nothing. Don’t run out and call the nurse. Don’t pick up the phone. Take a deep breath and be present to the magnitude of the moment. There’s a grace to being at the bedside of someone you love as…
At our local Quadra Library, there is now a shelving unit of books dedicated to topics relating to caregiving and end-of-life. As you come through the entrance, turn immediately to the right and you will see it bside the magazines. Community members are invited to browse the titles. If you see one you’d like to borrow, jot down the date, book title, and…
Life is like a song. It has crescendos and rhythm and a beginning, middle and end. The Threshold Choir takes this song metaphor literally and uses it to comfort individuals who are ill or near the end of life, with music and harmony. While singing at bedsides, people have told the singers they feel less pain, anxiety and loneliness. Threshold Choirs were…
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of…
Suzanne B. O’Brien RN, creator of Doulagivers, has been at the forefront of the End-of-Life Doula Movement in the United States since it began building momentum nearly a decade ago. She has years of experience working with over one thousand end-of-life patients as a hospice nurse and palliative care professional. Suzanne writes that Death is currently the number one fear…
Although most Canadians say they’d like to die at home, more than half of us die in a hospital. Subsequently, it is nurses, particularly those who work in hospice care, who are with the patient, or the patient and their family, when the death occurs. At our recent Way To Meeting, we invited Huguette, a retired hospice nurse, to share…