Even though I would argue that most deaths aren’t good, we improve the quality of death of the vast majority of people we care for, often substantially. And there isn’t much that’s more satisfying than that.
It just doesn’t make the death good.
With the assistance of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies and Exit International, I surveyed voluntary assisted dying (VAD) advocates and supporters around the world to inject some much-needed data and objectivity into the VAD debate.
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
Final Exit Network’s blog has had over 105,000 views since its inception.
We had a a rare reason to celebrate last week when the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) pulled back on its threat to curtail the boom in “telemedicine” that allowed us to deal with COVID-19.
It’s important to have age-appropriate dialogue with children about death.
There is growing research exploring the overwhelming anxiety that the inevitability of death, and our uncertainty about when it will occur, has the power to create. A social psychological theory, called terror management theory (TMT), is one way to understand how this anxiety influences our behaviour and sense of self.
These stories are not for everyone, but they are topics that the author believes shouldn’t remain in the silence.
End-of-life conversations can ease suffering for families, not just patients. You can start these conversations simply, like saying, “I need to think about the future. Can you help me?”
On Saturday, February 18, 2023, when the Carter Center announced that former President Jimmy Carter would be receiving hospice care at home, I was both saddened by what this decision essentially means for the former president, and intrigued by the possibility of having broader discussions about hospice and, more specifically, end-of-life doulas.
