ABOUT DIANE BURNSIDE MURDOCK'S THE NEW ART OF DYING How would you like to die? Only you can answer this. Whatever your age, cultural identity, ethnic background, or beliefs, read this book if you want to talk about dying but don't know what you want to say. Each of us has our own special feelings, hopes, fears, and desires about this universal issue. These days, dying can happen in many different ways because of high-intensity therapies that prolong living and postpone dying. The proliferation of choices, possibilities, and alternatives can be overwhelming. The New Art of Dying is a constructive and thorough guide to empower you to make your own choices. There is no one answer for dying correctly. There's no wrong answer either. Each of us wants to get it right and do it our own way. The New Art Of Dying is a handbook for our time. This step-by-step guide to making your own choices teaches: - How to discover who you are and live life to its end - How to deal with dying in your own unique way - How to make decisions about life-sustaining treatments and procedures, palliative care, and legal documents on advance care planning - How to keep unpredictable problems from upsetting what you want - How to give loved ones the gift of caring for you the way you wish It is progressive about patient rights, making you the central figure and enabling you to experience dying the way you have experienced life- by being in charge of your own destiny. It's for you only, a continuing reference and source of inspiration. An expose on the American way of dying - penetrating and passionate...it speaks the truth. Scrupulously confronting the many options to choose from whether medical, palliative or legal - the problems we face and what can go wrong. Revelatory, helping you get at your attitudes on dying coming from your background and beliefs to create a personal end-of-life experience.

Having a rare blood type, after a 20 year wait for a successful transplant, transplant survivor, author David Fraser Wright learned that having a sense of humor about medicine and medical situations is as important as the technical knowledge and loving care one receives along the way.

Death studies have, over the last twenty years, witnessed a flourishing of research and scholarship particularly in areas such as dying and bereavement, cultural practices and fear of dying. But, despite its importance, a specific focus on the nature of personal mortality has attracted surprisingly little attention. Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. Chapters are organized around the question of how an ongoing relationship might be possible when the threat of consciousness coming to an end points to an unspeakable nothingness. The book then argues that, despite this threat, an ongoing relationship with one's own death is still possible by means of conceptual devices, or 'enabling frames', that help shape personal mortality into a relatable object. In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events.

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.

Die meisten Menschen in Deutschland sterben in Institutionen wie Krankenhausern oder Pflegeheimen, wo die Personalsituation oft angespannt ist. Damit Patienten und Bewohner in Wurde und Geborgenheit ihr Lebensende erleben konnen, unterstutzen zahlreiche ehrenamtliche Sterbebegleiter/-innen die hauptamtlich Tatigen. Die Ehrenamtlichen bringen durch ihre Zeit, Zuwendung, Aufmerksamkeit, Ruhe, Gelassenheit und Offenheit Erleichterung in den Alltag und speziell in die Situation Sterbender.Dieses Handbuch bereitet auf die ehrenamtliche Sterbebegleitung professionell vor. Dabei steht die Entwicklung einer inneren Haltung der Achtsamkeit und Wertschatzung sterbenden Menschen und ihren Angehorigen gegenuber im Mittelpunkt. In der Auseinandersetzung mit eigenen Verlusten und dem Sterben lernen die Kursteilnehmerinnen und -teilnehmer, die Bedurfnisse von Menschen in ihrer letzten Lebensphase sensibel wahrzunehmen und die Beziehung zu ihnen individuell und angemessen zu gestalten. Themen sind: eigene Abschieds- und Grenzerfahrungen, Schulung der Wahrnehmung, Kommunikation mit schwersterkrankten Menschen/Gesprachsfuhrung, Trauer, eigene Motivation fur den Dienst, Psychohygiene. Dieses Handbuch Ehrenamtliche Sterbebegleitung umfasst neben einer Einfuhrung in die einzelnen thematischen Bereiche zahlreiche Ubungsmodule mit genauen Beschreibungen.

Since the efforts of Dame Cicely Saunders and the founders of the modern hospice movement, compassion has become a fundamental part of palliative care. In this ground-breaking book, international experts give their critical thoughts on the essence and role of compassion, in both palliative and hospice care over the past half-century. Compassion: The essence of palliative and end-of-life care provides insight into the motivations for, and practice of, compassionate palliative and hospice care, featuring the reflections of leading healthcare professionals, social workers, chaplains and educators. Chapters utilise case examples and first-hand experiences to explore the historical and contemporary discourse surrounding the concept of compassion in palliative medicine. This book is relevant to a multidisciplinary audience of palliative care practitioners, including undergraduate and graduate students in sociology, psychology and theology, and healthcare professionals in oncology and gerontology.

About her career as a Hospice Nurse and her book, Margaret Dodson says: I have been honored to share in the living, dying, and deaths of the most extraordinary "ordinary" people. I have entered into lives months away from their dying and moments away from their dying. Each person I have met in this work has been etched into my heart; how could I help but be touched by them? I realized that I needed to go away for a few days with a list of the people and families I had cared for during the year, and I needed time to spend my "last visit" with them privately to say goodbye. As I sat looking at the sea and feeling so full of these stories, they began to pour from me onto these pages. I would look at a name and I was transported not only to that person but also to that family, their home, the conversations, the intimacies, the suffering, the peace and even the joy. It would be presumptuous to say I have become wise by these experiences, but my gratitude for this enrichment is boundless. Much of the time I do not feel wise; yet, as the years have passed and the stories accumulate, I do feel as though I have acquired lessons to share. The lessons Margaret has learned are this book.

With an 'Attitude of Gratitude', author David Fraser Wright survived a 20 year wait for a liver transplant. He has selected ideas, artwork, and reactions to events, over that time, and presents them to you, from a year by year compilation - with the most inspirational one from each year, followed by an idea guide for 'What's Next?'.

"We as the American hospices are not sent to help the poor African hospices, but to deepen relationships with them, to assess needs and to discover how they function. We can share our knowledge with them, and they in turn can share their knowledge and insight with us." Hospice and Palliative Care is a new concept in Africa, and is established, funded and carried out in different ways than American hospices. The author's 3-pronged purpose in writing this book is to: 1) Approach hospice care from a missional point of view, 2) Share the importance of compassionate, faith-based end-of-life care, and 3) Understand and appreciate Zambia's challenges of hospice and palliative care.