Tag: Meditation

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What does a death doula do?

— Alua Arthur on her ancient profession

Alua Arthur

Death anxiety and end-of-life planning are all in a day’s work for a care worker who helps shepherd clients off this mortal coil

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There is little about Alua Arthur that emanates the deathly or morbid. The 45-year-old Los Angeles resident has a radiant, gap-toothed smile, a propensity for citrus-colored nail polish and an inclination to laugh before she finishes a sentence.

But not long ago, she was a Legal Aid worker struggling with depression, frequently taking breaks to travel around the world, attend music festivals, visit friends and enjoy short-lived romances with fellow searchers. While backpacking in Cuba, she boarded a bus and sat next to a woman around her age who revealed that she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. What followed was an hours-long conversation that sent her world off its axis.

“It was strangely intimate and comfortable and hilarious,” Arthur said. “There was such an ease in our new friendship that allowed us to travel to the depths together, and discuss our fears and hopes.” Not long after she came home, her brother-in-law was dying of cancer, and she threw herself into caring for him, her sister and her then four-year-old niece.

Within a few months, she followed her gut and enrolled in a training program to become a death doula, an end-of-life care worker who helps people tie up their affairs and feel more at ease as they face the inevitable. The job can involve providing company, talking through clients’ feelings about estranged friends and family members, and helping them look back on their lives and identify the moments of which they are proud and also their regrets. It’s a calling that Arthur, who grew up in Colorado as the daughter of political refugees from Ghana, details in her rousing memoir, Briefly Perfectly Human.

A celebratory spirit pervades the book. The flip side of thinking about death all day, after all, is remembering how fleeting life is and relishing the mere act of living, as well as the people and natural beauty that surrounds us. Arthur, whose company, Going With Grace, has trained over 2,500 death professionals in 17 countries, spoke with the Guardian about her end-of-life work.

The death doula seems to be gaining popularity, on the heels of the birth doula. Do you sense that we will be hearing about death doulas more and more?

The death doula is very ancient, because as long as humans have been alive, they’ve been dying, and others have been supporting them into their dying. But the profession and the formality of it have been rising in the modern world. It’s similar to birth doulas in the concept and in the work that we do – we care for and celebrate one another. But there’s now a Fortune 500 company that has a death doula benefit as part of their benefits program, where employees get reimbursed to seek the services of a doula for somebody that they consider family. They can help be supportive for somebody’s dying and get reimbursed. Isn’t that pretty rad?

You talk a lot in your book about the difference between empathy and compassion. Can you walk me through that?

I’ve been really empathic all my life. I feel things very deeply. And I feel that I’m feeling things on behalf of other people, but also what I’m feeling for them are things that I’ve made up in my head about what the experience is like. And when I’m doing that when somebody is dying, it’s really dangerous because I don’t know what it’s like to be dying. I can imagine it all I want, but I don’t know what it’s like, and that can be really problematic. This may be a little rude, but I feel like empathic people, sometimes we’re pretty self-aggrandizing in some way. What we have to do when we’re working with people that are dying is practice lucid compassion, which says: I don’t know what it is that you’re experiencing, but I’m down. I’m here with you, and I’ll ride with you.

Book cover of Briefly Perfectly Human, by Alua Arthur.

What does a typical week in your work life look like?

I’m not seeing clients currently – I’m way too busy. These days I’m focusing on spreading public awareness about how we die, hoping to help more people get support when they’re dying, and honestly help more death doulas get clients. But when I was seeing clients, I would have probably just one client whose death looks like it’s coming soon, and then multiple end-of-life-planning clients. And I’d also be doing death meditations, and hosting workshops and helping healthy people plan for the end of life, and helping somebody who has a serious illness.

So not all of your clients count as end-of-life patients?

Many clients are people that carry a lot of death anxiety. There was one client who I met with maybe for two years. His mom had died and his death anxiety was through the roof after she died. And so once a week for almost two years, he would sit and talk about where death anxiety popped up in his life that week, and we’d work through it. I’d offer tips and tricks and we’d do exercises. There was one young woman, she was 22 years old and her parents were in their 50s. But she just thought that it’d be wise to do end-of-life planning and I thought, oh, cool. Let’s do it.

There is a trend in our culture to fetishize the “birth story” but people back off from discussing death, let alone the “death story”.

We want to pretend that it’s not happening. And yet it’s happening every day, all around us. Not only in nature, but there’s probably somebody a few doors down from your home who knows somebody who’s in the process of dying. And we don’t have any skills to talk about our experience. We don’t make space for grief.

But I feel like it’s starting to shift. For example, this television series, Limitless, with Chris Hemsworth. In one of the episodes he explores the limits of his physical body. Even though the previous episodes were all about how he could live longer and better, a whole one is thinking about death.

Our world is lousy with biohackers trying to stave off death.

We can’t escape it. That’s kind of the point. People work so hard to create all these workarounds and try to deny it in some capacity. But by denying it, they’re making it more real. Like, why not just spend the time talking about your fears of death?

In your book you don’t hold back about your battle with depression. How does that inform your work?

Well, for starters, my life prior to death care was just kind of a hot mess. There was no direction, no purpose, but there was plenty of adventure. I was the lawyer working at Legal Aid and who was broke, saddled in debt. Prior to death care, I was always seeking something – you know, something that made me feel alive. I sought out big adventures, traveled to faraway places, ate different foods. I used to go to Burning Man but I haven’t been recently. I think that part of me has always been seeking peak experiences in life. That part of me lends itself really, really easily to death care because a big part of my relationship to death is grounding myself in this body of this life for now, and filling it up as much as I can.

What’s the number one question people ask you when they’re dying?

They always ask what the meaning of it all is. And I don’t know! I know that maybe the locs and the dark skin and the jewelry make people think that I’m talking to other beings all the time, that I’m mystical. But I don’t know anything.

Two of my friends recently lost their parents and I’ve been struggling with writing letters to them. Do you have any advice?

Sometimes the right thing to do is just to show up and say, like, “This is really, really hard but I don’t know what to say, but just know that I care about you. Just know that I know this happened. I don’t know what you’re experiencing. And this is uncomfortable, but I want you to know that I’m here and I care about you.” And then you’ll probably get a thank-you, and if they want to talk about the person they lost, they will, and if they want to talk about the Kardashians, they will.

How does your current work influence the way you live now?

I think I give myself a lot more grace for the mistakes I make and my sadness and my fear and my doubt, and the extra pounds that I’m carrying. I give myself a lot more freedom to enjoy food. Whereas before, I was so concerned with being skinny and exercising, and now I’m like, fuck it, like I’m so grateful for this body that carries me around Earth. Plus, I love chocolate cake.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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After I Lost My Son, I Realized I Needed to Stop Looking for Closure

By Liz Jensen

Four years ago, I got the news that every parent dreads.

Without warning, my healthy 25-year-old son, Raphaël — a wildlife biologist and an environmental activist — had collapsed and died, probably from a rare heart disorder nobody knew he had. The trauma catapulted me into a place of almost hallucinatory madness: a territory so tormenting, debilitating and bleak that I couldn’t imagine how I’d survive it, let alone find joy in the life that remained.

Catastrophes are radicalizing and transformative. You no longer see your life in the same way afterward. But must grief diminish you, or can it do the opposite?

The question was vital because my devastation as a newly bereaved mother felt mirrored by the pain and anxiety of millions of people struggling to process the consequences of global heating and the obliteration of precious ecosystems.

Both forms of grief were rooted in love. Both required courage, resilience and compassion. And the emotional arc of both, I came to believe, could create the strength and purpose needed to navigate an increasingly unstable future.

In the field of death and dying, one of the most enduring and influential figures is the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who in the 1960s came up with the five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She’d been studying the emotional arcs of terminally ill patients, but later she and her colleague David Kessler repurposed the stages to apply to the grief of the bereaved, and the five-stage model became deeply embedded in Western culture.

In a 2007 paper, the Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Steven Running applied those stages to the climate crisis, characterizing denial as the belief that the climate emergency isn’t happening or that humans aren’t the root cause. The anger stage kicks in when you realize your worldview or lifestyle will have to change substantially. Then you bargain by downplaying the scale of the crisis or by putting all your faith in technological fixes. The depression stage manifests when you feel overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis and realize that governments and corporations are not only spinning their wheels but also often actively exacerbating the damage. Acceptance entails recognizing that the scale of the challenge is irrefutable and then looking for solutions, because “doing nothing given our present knowledge is unconscionable,” Mr. Running wrote.

After tragedy struck Mr. Kessler, he altered his own analysis of bereavement. As an author and public speaker who had spent his career supporting the bereaved, he felt he knew grief well. But the unexpected death of his 21-year-old son changed everything. Suddenly, like countless other bereaved parents, he faced the existential question raised in the adage that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. And he came to believe that acceptance isn’t the end of the grieving process; it’s only the beginning of a new, sixth stage of grief, defined not by finding closure but by finding meaning.

This stage made a lot more sense to me than any of the others did. There was no meaning in Raphaël’s death. But I could find purpose, meaning and fulfillment in what I did and made happen in its wake.

The year before Raphaël died, I co-founded the literary activist group Writers Rebel to put literature in the service of life on Earth. But after we lost him, I stepped back: I couldn’t face the video calls. Then, in those early months of grieving, I began to meet other bereaved parents, take daily swims in the freezing Danish winter sea, reconnect with the natural world and read books about consciousness that led me to abandon my rational, secular view of it. And one day, I remembered what Raphaël said when I belittled my ability to effect change: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.”

What, I began to wonder, could be more meaningful than honoring my son’s memory and the world I love by being active rather than crying on the couch?

Seven months after Raphaël’s death, I stood in the freezing Copenhagen wind with a group of writers and made a speech about why literature must address the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. I was raw and nervous, but I sensed his presence. When I quoted him — “I won’t stand aside and watch the world burn” — a huge cheer went up, and I felt an inner shift.

Yes, my son was dead. And yes, the planet’s life support systems were weakening. But it wasn’t too late for the planet.

I rejoined my weekly Zooms and helped organize a tribute to Earth’s most critically endangered species. Later, the notes I’d been writing to myself as therapy began morphing into a memoir. And yes, it all felt meaningful.

Mine was just one of many paths from grief to fulfillment. For those feeling paralyzed by climate grief, just doing something new or doing something familiar more mindfully can germinate what the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls active hope: not the amorphous hope of wishing on a star but the practical hope of rolling up your sleeves and getting to it. Intentions are fine, but the meaning lies in the doing — be it cheering up a friend, energizing voters, transforming a patch of urban scrub into a garden, joining a citizens’ movement, switching to a plant-based diet, ditching a bad habit or taking time to observe a creature in the wild.

Just a few months before the electrical signals in Raphaël’s heart were catastrophically disrupted, I found a passage in his notebook that showed he had a premonition that he would die young but that his sense of purpose would stay vividly alive.

“I’ll not be dead until my dream is, I’ll not fade away until my vision does, I’ll not be gone until all my hopes are,” he wrote.

It took his death for me to understand why I was born. It can’t take a civilizational collapse for humanity to understand why we belong here.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Illness and death are facts of life

– Buddhism teaches us to be mindful but not fearful of it

‘It doesn’t take a deep understanding of Buddhism to acknowledge that sickness, old age, and death are inevitable facts of life.’

The art of developing a healthy relationship with our own mortality lies in neither avoiding the reality of suffering nor obsessing over it

By Nadine Levy

Over the last year, I have spent a lot of time eating pre-packaged sandwiches in hospital cafeterias. I often joke that those of us who are lucky enough to hit 35 will have at least one, if not multiple, serious health scares every year. At some point, however, we will face much more than a simple scare – serious illness can impact anyone, any time, with little notice.

As well as being a source of stress, pain and discomfort, unwanted health diagnoses have the radical potential to upend our lives and ignite burning questions relating to impermanence and human suffering which we may not have considered in the past. We may come face-to-face with our shared vulnerability for the first time – which was present all along – as well as the indisputable fact that we are all but one breath away from a health crisis or poor prognosis.

Working with our mortality in a meaningful way can be challenging. For one, we live in a death-averse culture in which comforting and life-affirming ways of thinking and talking about illness and death are rare. Further, the unprecedented nature of Covid-19, as well as an increase in self-diagnosis via the internet (“cyberchondria”), has been associated with an overall rise in health anxiety.

In the founding story of Buddhism, the historical Buddha, a sheltered 29-year-old prince, ventures out of his palace and for the first time encounters sickness, ageing, and death on the streets of what is now Nepal. These sights impact him in such a visceral and immediate way that he is compelled to relinquish his wealth and material comforts to enter a life of asceticism, contemplation, and reflection.

It doesn’t take a deep understanding of Buddhism to acknowledge that sickness, old age, and death are inevitable facts of life. Many of us know this intimately. However, we may not realise that the more we deny this truth and cling to a fantasy of perpetual health and youthfulness, the more we suffer.

This is not to dismiss our attempts at living a healthy lifestyle that prevents ill health. Indeed, moderation and cultivating physical and mental wellbeing are at the heart of Buddhist practice. Still, we face the cruel irony that even our best efforts to address risk factors through diet, exercise, and supplementation, often fall short. Mark Twain once said, “I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.”

On my first overseas trip as a child, I witnessed individuals with debilitating and treatable illnesses in plain sight. One afternoon, I went to a cafe for lunch and couldn’t swallow my sandwich. As hard as I tried, I could not force the muscles in my throat to perform their job. There was a lump in my throat that persisted. The sharp edges of the human condition had suddenly shifted from theory to reality.

I encountered Buddhism a few years later and I was relieved to find an approach that did not look away from what was true: the body deteriorates, decays, and changes. It is made up of the elements and is of the nature to sicken, age, and die. While death is certain, the time of death is uncertain. Do not turn away from your mortality.

Later, I downloaded an app that reminded me daily I was going to die, though I’m not sure I needed the reminder.

Was this a type of exposure therapy that would liberate me from my worst fears, or was it simply making my anxiety worse?

Years later, I confided in a Buddhist teacher about my ongoing health anxiety, and he said something that changed the way I now view the Buddhist practice of death contemplation: the art is not to be anxiously fixated on death but simply mindful of it. The invitation was to extend a gentle and curious gaze to our fear of death itself. This seems a subtle point, but one that has enormous significance.

First, it invites us to bring awareness to how we relate to and perceive our impermanence. What is it that scares us exactly? The psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom talks about death and health anxiety being a placeholder for a range of natural existential concerns – from fear of pain, loss, and separation from loved ones to terror of our ultimate annihilation. At times, it correlates with deep disappointment that our life has lacked meaning or purpose.

Once we become familiar with what “health” or “death” represent in our unique psyche, we can bring attention to when and how these fears present themselves. Do particular sensations, memories, or emotions trigger these fears? Are they felt predominantly in the body or in a mind that races and tries to fix and control? Do you find yourself reaching for your phone? Instead, can you remain in the here and now, with a racing heart, lump in your throat, images of a poor prognosis, or your final breath? Can you stay put and allow the fears to arise, change, and dissipate? The practice is to avoid the extremes of obsessing about the finitude of our life on the one hand and avoiding our mortality on the other. Acceptance and wisdom lie in the place in between.

You and I will die. Can we stay steady in our seat knowing this with certainty, while remaining open to a broader indescribable mystery which may well outperform our wildest expectations?

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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We’re all going to die someday.

— Toronto ‘death cafés’ offers a new way to get comfortable with that fact

Death-care practices vary according to culture and religion and many death doulas argue that in western cultures there’s still a lingering taboo around frank talk about death, something that makes it harder for many to deal with death, dying and grieving.

“We’ve heard the saying that it takes a village to raise a child. That village is equally important at the end of our life as it is in the beginning.”

BY Christine Sismondo

After more than a decade living side by side on a quiet street in Toronto’s east end, Fiona* and her partner Lorraine* had become close friends with their neighbour Tony.

“Lorraine and Tony talked all the time,” said Fiona. “When he started getting older and lived on his own, she helped him with errands and grocery runs. I mowed his lawn.”

When Tony was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 2018, Fiona started cooking for him and filling in when support workers and nurses weren’t on duty.

When it came to preparing to die, though, the couple decided Tony needed more help than they could offer.

They enlisted the help of a death doula: someone who is trained to help with emotional and physical support as well as education about the end-of-life process.

In the last couple of days of Tony’s life, Fiona slept on the couch next to his bed. The doula and Lorraine sat with him until he died.

What struck Fiona as most remarkable, she said, was the “ceremony of it all.” Lorraine and the doula washed Tony’s body and sat with him for hours after he passed.

“I think, in a lot of western cultures, people don’t want to hang out with a person’s body after they’ve gone,” she said. “This felt like helping him to move on and there was a level of comfort in it that helped all of us.”

Death-care practices vary according to culture and religion, and many doulas argue that in western cultures there’s a lingering taboo around frank talk about death, something that makes it harder for many to deal with death, dying and grieving.

That started to change 20 years ago with the first “death café,” an initiative launched by a recently widowed Swiss sociologist named Bernard Crettaz. The concept — usually a scheduled group discussion about death among people from all walks of life (not to be mistaken for grief counselling) — has since spread and evolved.

“Now there are ‘death salons,’ ‘death dialogues’ and ‘death book clubs,’” said Kayla Moryoussef, who works with Toronto’s Home Hospice Association and has her own practice, the Good Death Doula. “There’s even a ‘death over drafts’ thing where people meet in bars to drink and talk about dying and death.”

Probably the biggest change to the death café model in Toronto has been that, pre-pandemic, the Home Hospice Association’s death cafés were held in bricks and mortar spaces. When the pandemic forced the cafés online and they no longer had to worry about venues and attendance, it allowed the association to offer more niche programming, such as cafés for parents, pet lovers caregivers and “spoonies” (people experiencing chronic pain).

“I came up with the idea for a spoonies death café because, as a person with chronic illness and disability, I know my relationship with dying and death is fundamentally different than my peers, — especially peers my age,” said Moryoussef, who is now in her late 30s.

The mission at the Home Hospice Association is to offer distinct programming for different communities in the name of accessibility and equitability.

“The reason we even got into this death doula training, development and mobilization was because we could see that our health-care system was not going to be able to keep up,” said Tracey Robertson, a doula and co-founder of Toronto’s Home Hospice Association.

Even if our health-care system could bounce back from its current state, most medical training is about finding cures, and many doctors receive little or no training when it comes to talking about death.

“We’ve all heard the saying that it takes a village to raise a child — we always say that village is equally important at the end of our life as it is in the beginning — some may even say more important,” said Robertson.

Death cafés are part of the foundation for that vision, she explained, because you can only build that village after death is normalized and communities are more comfortable talking about it.

“All it requires is for all of us to just get a little bit more comfortable with the fact that we all are going to be there one day,” said Robertson. “How can we help our neighbour who is faced with the reality of sitting in a doctor’s office and hearing words none of us ever want to hear?”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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All that is true about aging is illuminated on a walk

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I was out today in the early morning walking with a close friend of 64 years named Shelley Adams. Despite some huge losses over time, she is always overtly positive. I don’t normally like this in a person. I make a rare exception for her. We hike several times a week beside our local creek, now a twisting, flowing stream that rushes over rocks, mint and twigs.

Rainer Maria Rilke was only partially right when he wrote that “life holds you in its hands and will not let you fall,” because both Shelley and I, like all older people, have been dropped. But life also at some point pulls you back to your feet. What do you do in between, during times of loss or general dread? My friend Tom Weston, a Jesuit priest, always reminds me, “We do what’s possible.” I hate that.

Okay, fine: What is possible? The practical, simple and kind. We work, love and help others as best we can, gawk at nature, rest. Is that it? Pretty much.

This is a little disappointing, but age teaches us that kind, simple and practical are enough, even in the face of the worst things we’ve lived through: suicides, mental illness, odious leaders, sudden death. My friend Don was called one day by an aging and suicidal friend. His friend asked, “What is the point of it all?” After a moment, Don replied gently, “Mornings are nice.” And, wildly, it was enough. His friend improved.

I cannot hike the uphill trails here anymore because of my hip, so we do what’s possible: take four 10-minute laps back and forth along the creek. Everything that is true about aging appears to me on these walks.

On our first lap, Shelley and I catch up. We’ve always been talkers, readers, movie lovers. What was true about us at 6 years old is true about us now. We gossip, laugh a lot, quibble. We looked so similar as small kids, with green eyes and white-blonde hair. We still do. We’re built about the same. I’m a bit taller and smaller-boned, but otherwise we could be sisters. And like sisters, we can annoy each other, and weaponize silence. Families, sigh.

I grew up at her house. Her mother was my other mother, who saw how amazing I was on the inside, not just how much better I could be doing. Shelley and I went through childhood and puberty together, played competitive tennis for years as partners and then didn’t see each other much for 40 years. We raised kids, buried parents; sad, scary things have happened to us both, as they have to everyone by a certain age. Now, we’re slower, less busy, a bit goofy.

For instance, this morning, while searching for the word “coaster,” the closest I could come up with was “coffee pad.” She laughs so hard when I say this, she has to cross her legs, and then almost loses her balance.

By the second lap, our bodies have loosened up, and we talk a bit less and look around a lot more, and listen. The creek is the place where the water and the land are in constant conversation. My vision is often blurred by dry eye, but there is a grace to myopia: I’m less fixated.

We walked this morning in raincoats because it was drizzling off and on, even as the sun shone through faintly. In my family, we always announced during a sun shower that it must be a monkey’s birthday somewhere. In Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” a mother tells her child, “The sun is shining through the rain. This is the time when foxes have their weddings.”

Like most old friends, we can bobble along without talking for stretches. I listen for the soft orchestral music of the woods on either side of the path. After scanning the illuminated green scrim of trees ahead and far away, I pull closer in on individual trees, all arms and elbows and long legs. The trees just stand around, as is their wont. The drizzle plays them. What instruments are they? Mostly woodwinds, maybe oboes, some flutier, and then dark, dark trees, like kettle drums, like patches of life.

Because we go back so far, Shelley and I know each other’s souls and shadows, and each other’s major screw-ups, and there is comfort in this. Also, we have made mistakes with each other that have felt like betrayals. This happens in families. We have gotten so mad that we have ditched each other on the trail and shouted to each other’s back, “Don’t you dare walk away from me.” Actually, that was only me. We take breaks, make up.

By the third lap, my hip has begun coughing quietly to get my attention. It would like to go home now. My vision is even more blurry because of the drizzle and thin light, added to the dry eyes. This is part of what it means for me to be alive still, the blinky vision. Paradoxically, I see more. Now, instead of sharp focus, there’s an appreciation of shifts in light that reveal the mutability of the world. The light sometimes changes minute by minute, and with it we perceive changes in the energy around us, above us, inside us. It moves our attention outside our squinty, judgy little selves.

We point out dark-eyed Oregon juncos to each other and finches, the males with their glorious red headdresses and chests, the females in their faded brown bathrobes. We talk about spiritual things and people we hate — as she puts it, “people we’re allergic to, bless their hearts.’” We talk about our scattered minds: This morning, I was struggling to read some tiny print in a book, and, without thinking, I touched the printed page to pinch it out and make it bigger. Eeesh, I thought: Scary! But I was gentle with myself about it.

My hip has really begun to ache by the final lap. We talk and limp along. Easily half of the people in our conversations have passed on, all four parents, both of her younger siblings, dearest friends. We know that death won’t be so hard. We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed.

Age is giving me the two best gifts: softness and illumination. It would have been nice if whoever is in charge of such things doled them out in our younger years, but that’s not how it works. Age ferries them across the water, and they will bring us through whatever comes.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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“I’m not afraid of dying…

But I’m not ready to give in yet”

Lisa Brassington spoke with us in October as she was receiving support from Marie Curie Hospice, Bradford. Here she talks about how the kindness of Marie Curie staff made all the difference to her wellbeing.

By Lisa Brassington

I was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2011. I’ve had years of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but I’m on the very last chemo now. After that, there are no more treatment options. The tumour has started to spread to my temporal lobe, so it’s affecting different areas of my body and I’m paralysed down one side. I now need a lot of support.

I used to go to the gym three times a week and I loved food and cooking. I love reading and history. I fostered and rescued Bassett hounds. I had a Bassett hound called Ralph who I walked daily, but I had to give him up. A fantastic rescue charity found him a beautiful home and they keep me updated on his progress. I’ll never be able to have another dog. That breaks my heart.

Before coming to Marie Curie Hospice, Bradford, I’d been stuck in my bedroom at home for over eight months. My husband and I had been looking for care that whole time and couldn’t find anywhere that could support my needs. I felt so unsafe and frightened. Eventually, we found the hospice, and now I feel so safe, cared for, and even loved.

Nothing better than a hug

The Marie Curie Hospice in Bradford is fantastic and it had such an impact on my outlook. It’s not just the unbelievable care they give, it’s their kindness as well. I’ve never experienced kindness like it here, and I’ll never forget that. The staff are always smiling, and I get hugs and lots of care and attention. There’s nothing more important to me than a hug.

Before I arrived, I hadn’t eaten for a long time, so I had no energy, but the food here is delicious and the nurses encourage me to eat. Now everybody is saying I’ve got colour in my cheeks – it’s amazing.

The nurses offered to take my bed outside

There’s a lovely bath here that I can use, and I have a beautiful view of the garden outside of my room, I can watch the squirrels and birds feeding on the bird table. The nurses even offered to take my hospice bed outside if I wanted them to. Because of my condition, I wake up and I don’t know what day it is. I’ve been FaceTiming friends and family thinking it was the evening, but it’s actually been the morning. The nurses write down on a board what day it is and who is supporting me, which is so simple but so helpful for me.

When I first arrived, I told the staff that I love dark, West Indian rum. They told me I can have some here, and so I have my little rum nightcap, which is lovely. Nothing is off limits.
— Lisa

The healthcare assistants and nurses always find time to come and charge my electrical devices, which keep me in touch with family and friends. They’re constantly busy helping people, I can hear their buzzers going off all the time calling them into different rooms, but they still find time to come and charge my things for me and spend some time with me.

A sense of achievement

The hospice has got a fantastic physiotherapist team who have helped me to use the gym. I’ve even taken four steps, which is amazing. It’s not just the sense of achievement for me, it’s the feedback the team gives. I constantly get praised and encouraged. I never realised how important encouragement was until I came here. They have given me some exercises, and I do what I can to try to get my body working.

We’re all dying… I’m one of them

I’ve had a fantastic life, I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do, I’ve been everywhere I wanted to go. I’m now doing my bucket list. I’ve jumped out of aeroplanes, I’ve gone down to the Spinnaker Tower, I just love doing something different. I’d love to go on a zip-wire, in fact I had a joke with the team here about the hoist in my room!

It was frightening when I first heard the word “hospice” because I just thought of dying people. There’s nothing wrong with dying people, we’re all dying, but it scared me to realise that I’m actually one of them. Now, I’m not afraid of dying. In fact, sometimes, I think it’s going to be a release. But, I’ve always been a fighter and I’m not ready to give in yet.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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I’d only met my neighbor a few times. When she died I took in her dog.

— As we walk the halls of the children’s hospital, I hope my neighbor is smiling, knowing how much joy her dog brings to everyone she meets

Lisa Kanarek with her dog Gaia, who she adopted after Gaia’s former owner died. Gaia is now a pet therapy dog, and the two regularly visit a children’s hospital. Gaia’s birthday is Valentine’s Day.

by Lisa Kanarek

In the early morning after Thanksgiving, I awoke to red lights blinking through the blinds. I slipped a long, puffy coat over my pajamas and rushed outside.

An ambulance idled in my 80-year-old neighbor Sandra’s driveway as paramedics rolled a gurney into her home. Although I hardly knew her, my neighbor’s last trip to the hospital would set off a ripple effect that would change my life and affect others she’d never met.

I remembered Sandra had a large dog, so I texted her friend, Gilda. She took care of the pup any time my neighbor was away, and Gilda and I had exchanged numbers once. Gilda was out of town and told me where to find the spare key to Sandra’s house.

During the three years my husband and I lived next door, I had only been inside Sandra’s home twice. The first was a few weeks after we moved in. I rang the doorbell, and Sandra, dressed in a colorful skirt and blouse, invited me in. I guessed she was in her late 70s.

After introducing myself, her dog walked up to me, sniffed my shoes, then lay on her side.

“I’m Sandra, and this is Gaia,” she said. “She loves having her stomach rubbed.”

I liked my neighbor immediately. She was direct and matter-of-fact with her conversation.

“Trash pickup is on Mondays, and introduce yourself to the security patrol so they’ll know who you are if you need them,” she said as she wrote down her phone number and the security number. She told me about neighborhood parties. “I don’t have time for those,” she said. “I have other things I’d rather do.”

The second time I saw her was a month later when I brought her a plant. She had thanked me for the gift but hadn’t invited me in.

I thought of Sandra and our last conversation as I turned the key and stepped inside her home. The caramel and white husky strolled toward me, her head down and her eyes locked on mine.

Unable to remember the dog’s name, I looked down at the silver tag on her collar. “Hi, Gaia,” I said. She dropped to the ground and rolled on her back so I could rub her white belly.

I texted Gilda to ask if the pup could stay with us until she came back to town. “Sure. Thank you!” she wrote back. During the next few days, Gilda called to tell me she was trying to find someone to watch the dog while Sandra was in the hospital. I told her not to worry; my husband and I would take care of Gaia. I walked her twice daily.

A week later, when Sandra returned home, Gilda temporarily moved into the second bedroom and became her full-time caregiver. As my neighbor’s health deteriorated, Gilda and I became friends. I asked her if I could continue my walks with the dog.

Each time I picked up Gaia, Gilda and I chatted for at least 10 minutes. During one of these conversations, she asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.

“Do you want to keep Gaia when Sandra is gone?”

“She’s not going to live with you?” I asked.

“I wish she could, but we might be moving, and the new yard is too small for her,” she said.

“We’re happy to adopt her,” I answered. “We love Gaia already.”

>Less than two weeks later, Gilda texted me: “The hospice nurse is on her way. I think it’s time.” Within an hour after I arrived at her home, my frail neighbor took her last breath. I waited in the kitchen as Gilda and her husband said their tearful goodbyes.

The hospice nurse called the funeral home, and Gilda’s husband stepped into the kitchen. He patted Gaia on the head and scratched her back. “It’s time to take her to your house,” he said.

I attached her faded orange leash to her matching collar. By the time we crossed Sandra’s driveway and stepped onto my lawn, tears dripped onto my coat. I was mourning a woman I’d only talked with twice, but I felt connected to her through her animal companion, now mine. For weeks, I watched Gaia closely, knowing she would be sad, confused and possibly disoriented moving to a new home.

A month after Sandra died, I completed training as an end-of-life doula. Gaia was calm on our daily walks, even around the small children who stopped to pet her, so she seemed to be a good match as a therapy dog.

I finished the online training with Pet Partners, passed the in-person test and then applied to volunteer at a local children’s hospital.

On our first day at the hospital, I hid my shock at seeing a young girl with a shaved head and tubes attached to her arm, a patch on her hand to hold the IV needle in place. I knew the hospital specialized in treating complex cases, but I hadn’t mentally prepared for what I would find behind each door. Gaia had a different reaction, not hesitating to pad up to the bed and let the girl scratch her behind her ears.

Now, every other week, I slip Gaia’s purple therapy dog vest over her neck, and we head across town to see patients and their families. Before leaving the hospital room, I hand the child a trading card with Gaia’s picture on the front and facts about her on the back: favorite food, activities she likes and her birthday. When I could not confirm her date of birth, I listed my neighbor’s birthday, Feb. 14.

More than eight months later, I’m no longer surprised by the young patients we see. I follow Gaia’s lead and focus on making the children smile. They rub her back and tell me about their pets. Recently, one little boy asked for her phone number, while another told his mom, “Look at her badge, Mom. She’s a doctor!”

Gaia’s life changed when she became part of our family. She interacts with the kids down the street (her fan club) during our walks, and she provides laughter and levity to sick children, all with her tail wagging. She goes with us on road trips and to outdoor festivals where she knows that people will stop to run their hands down her fluffy back or ask her for a high-five.

My life is different too. Meeting dozens of people during our visits has brought out the extrovert tendencies I lost during the pandemic. Before I knock on each patient’s door, I breathe in, then greet families with confidence, knowing the reaction my sidekick will receive. The same skills I’ve learned through being with Gaia, I use as an end-of-life doula. One of the first ways I bond with a patient or a family member is through a conversation about our dogs.

Adopting my neighbor’s dog has allowed me the opportunity to pay it forward in ways I’ve never experienced before. As we pass through the halls of the children’s hospital, I think of Sandra and hope she’s smiling, knowing how much joy Gaia brings to everyone she meets.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!