Many years ago, I had a young colleague named Danielle. We worked on isolating virus cultures in a laboratory, side-by-side under sterile hoods; and often our conversation meandered to stories of our respective families. Danielle had recently become engaged and was enjoying the preliminaries to her wedding, which was still some months away. Danielle had one sister, and their elderly parents were happily married, healthy and enjoying their respective retirements in the small rural town where she was born. Mostly,…..
I am still getting used to it. I promised you I’d write about you, about us. This is harder to do than I thought it might be. A promise is a promise. We had twelve amazing years together. For these I give thanks every day. The last year was a rough one. From your diagnosis of pancreatic cancer till your death we had a mere seven months. Seven mindful months. Seven months to say goodbye. Seven months is not enough……
In my last year of high school, I had a pair of older friends who married fairly young. When they would go out together, they sometimes asked me to come along to be a companion to a visiting out-of-town friend whose name was Brent. Our double dates, if you want to call them that, were always platonic because Brent was destined to become my friends’ brother-in-law. He was engaged to the younger sister of the female, and his fiancée lived…..
In Journey’s End: Death, Dying, and the End of Life, it is our privilege to compile a great variety of content and resources. We have several goals for their use: To serve as educational tools in the training of professionals, students and volunteers To help and support families and friends as they prepare for and live through times of dying, death and bereavement To add to the cultural conversation and comfort level with the topic of death and dying Chapter…..
When someone whom we love dies, quite naturally we grieve. We have lost the connection to our loved one. So it seems. We have lost the place in our lives where we felt safe in the knowledge that our beloved was physically accessible, tangibly present. We feel lost. We miss the laughter in times of shared joy; we miss the tears in times of sorrow and times when our hearts connected in compassion. We miss the hugs, shared in every…..