Caregiving and Hospice, December 2 - December 8, 2012

Best selections from Grief Healing's Twitter stream this week:

Dying with peace and dignity: Engage with Grace movement http://j.mp/VpVdCx from @_lizzy_ via @BostonDotCom

Karen M. Wyatt, MD: What Doctors Need to Learn About Death and Dying, http://j.mp/WMev69

We All Need a Mental Vacation Destination, Caregivers. What’s Yours? http://j.mp/RbjxfX

Are you on Pinterest? You're cordially invited to visit, http://pinterest.com/griefhealing/ « Grief Healing

Can palliative care bridge the gap between cure-based care and hospice? Tell us what you think about Don's quote, http://fb.me/1q6iPMWim

A different way to get ready for the holidays: The Advent Conspiracy, http://j.mp/R0S2FI « Grief Healing Blog

Caregiving and Hospice, November 18 - November 24, 2012

Best selections from Grief Healing's Twitter stream this week:

Categorized Technology for Family Caregiving, http://buff.ly/WGuKX5 from @CaregivingCafe via @NFCAcaregivers

Five Principles For Elder Caregiving, http://j.mp/TgGzh1 via @SeniorList

Engage With Grace This Thanksgiving, http://j.mp/UVcGm2

Create your caregiving team with family and friends: Start a Personal, Safe, Free Website for Any Health Event,  http://ow.ly/eZgki « CaringBridge

Often confused with hospice care, the scope of palliative care is broader, http://bit.ly/QusSPJ via @hospicepharmacy

Caregiving and Hospice, November 20 - November 26, 2011

Best selections from Grief Healing's Twitter stream this week:

• Hospice and palliative care from professional journalist and widow's perspective, bit.ly/mUQJZk via @Robert_Fried

• Proactive Caregiving during the Holidays, http://bit.ly/v0ClFv via @SueSalach 

• Inside Chronic Illness, http://bit.ly/sJw1Qn by @stangoldberg 

• Engage with Grace, 2011, http://bit.ly/rKBGP8 

• Caregivers: We're not Mother Teresa, http://bit.ly/tZecjW by @stangoldberg

Engage with Grace, 2011

Occupy With Grace

Once again, this Thanksgiving we are grateful to all the people who keep this mission alive day after day: to ensure that each and every one of us understands, communicates, and has honored their end of life wishes.

Seems almost more fitting than usual this year, the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring, people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now, love it or hate it - it's the Occupy Wall Street movement that's got people talking.

Smart people (like our good friend Susannah Fox) have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn't an issue we need to raise our fists about - it's an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.

Caregiving and Hospice, November 21 - November 27

Best selections from Grief Healing's Twitter stream this week:

• At Thanksgiving, the hardest conversation, http://bit.ly/i72cOS via @EngageWithGrace @doclake

• NHPCO urges public to learn about advance care planning and discuss wishes, http://bit.ly/gqGZk7 

• Ten Ways to Thank a Caregiver, http://bit.ly/ThnxCrgvr via @Caring 

• Supporting a Friend's Choices in Hospice, Palliative Care and Death, http://ow.ly/3eyE3 via @tmlfox 

• Outstanding analysis: Chat on PBS’s Frontline 'Facing Death' Special, http://bit.ly/hJxDiK 

• End-of-Life Care is Often Futile, Costly, http://bit.ly/aSlHBO 

 

Engage With Grace, 2010

Things we are grateful for this year

For three years running now, many of us bloggers have participated in what we’ve called a “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at making sure all of us understand, communicate, and have honored our end-of-life wishes. 

The rally is timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these unbelievably important conversations – our closest friends and family.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation about end-of-life started. We’ve included them at the end of this post.  They’re not easy questions, but they are important – and believe it or not, most people find they actually enjoy discussing their answers with loved ones.  The key is having the conversation before it’s too late. 

This past year has done so much to support our mission to get more and more people talking about their end-of-life wishes. We’ve heard stories with happy endings ~ and stories with endings that could’ve (and should’ve) been better. We’ve stared down political opposition.  We’ve supported each other’s efforts.  And we’ve helped make this a topic of national importance.

So in the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, we’d like to highlight some things for which we’re grateful. 

Thank you to Atul Gawande for writing such a fiercely intelligent and compelling piece, Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can't Save Your Life – it is a work of art, and a must read. 

 

Thank you to whomever perpetuated the myth of “death panels” for putting a fine point on all the things we don’t stand for, and in the process,  shining a light on the right we all have to live our lives with intent – right through to the end. 

Thank you to TEDMED for letting us share our story and our vision.

 

And of course, thank you to everyone who has taken this topic so seriously, and to all who have  done so much to spread the word, including sharing The One Slide.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

Engage With Grace, 2009

Some conversations are easier than others.

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many bloggers participated in the first documented blog rally to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality, and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )