Death may be the ultimate stressful moment in our lives. Just thinking about the end is enough to cause your heart to beat faster. And while some levels of depression and anxiety are inevitable, those feelings need not overwhelm the death experience for you or your family. In fact, it’s possible to die well — to experience a sense of wellbeing as you approach the end. You can leave this life with a feeling of closure and a sense of contentment. That’s the difference between completing your life and merely ending it.
But stress disrupts well-being. It distracts you from prioritizing love, family, and dignity. Worry and fear interrupt precious time with family and friends. That’s no one’s idea of a good death. And while it’s easy to think you’ll skip this stressful step and go suddenly from a heart attack or stroke, the reality is the majority of us will need end-of-life care. So, put some thought and preparation into your passing now. Reducing stress will make it easier for you to say goodbye, and for your loved ones to let go. Here are six ways you can make dying the experience you want, rather than the experience you get.
Finalize Your Burial Arrangements
Preparing your burial arrangements lowers stress in several ways. For one, it puts you in control. Eliminate worry by outlining the type of service you want, the manner of internment, and the organ donation process. Burial arrangements also relieve financial stress from your family and friends. Carrying out your last wishes doesn’t have to be a financial burden for your family. So, find the best final expense insurance policy to cover costs. Or get a pre-paid funeral plan that kicks in after you’re gone. You’ll feel less stress knowing everything is taken care of.
Finally, by tending to your funeral arrangements yourself, your loved ones can focus more on spending time with you in your last day. And their grieving will be easier when they’re not weighed down with administrative tasks. Mourners often feel guilty devoting time to such business matters after a loved one dies.
Create a Living Will
If you become incapacitated before death, someone will have to make decisions for you. That’s a heavy responsibility to place on a family member or friend who may only have a rough idea of your wishes. But without a health care power of attorney (or proxy) to speak for you, you may end up being kept on life support longer than you’d prefer, or the opposite. An advanced directive or “living will” is a legal document that lists specific medical treatments you wish to receive and those you don’t. The directive takes the decision-making burden off your family’s shoulder.
To get started, have the end-of-life conversation with one or two people you would want to serve as your proxies. And also talk with your doctor so that everyone is on the same page. Living will forms vary by state. So, download your state’s advanced directive form to get started. If you don’t have the resources to create a living will, other forms of non-legal directives can work as some form of “proof” for your wishes. For example, write a letter to a family member expressing your wishes. Or record audio/video explaining what you want. While these aren’t formally recognized legal documents, they work better than nothing at all.
Make Amends
One thing that makes dying harder is knowing you’re leaving behind unsettled issues, old hurts, and past grudges. When possible, make amends with those you’ve hurt or who’ve hurt you. Now is the time for unburdening yourself and being honest with those you love. While you can leave those hurt feelings behind, your loved ones will carry them after you’re gone. And many will regret they didn’t say something when they had the chance. Knowing this will make leaving this life more stressful for you.
So, don’t put off making amends. Request a private audience with a loved one or wait for the right moment to broach the subject. Be honest and take responsibility for your part in the situation. Refer to the past event/issues that caused the rift, but don’t relive it all over again. And don’t bring up their responsibility; just explain your regrets and apologize. They will reciprocate. Think of this less as a discussion and more as a confession. So, listen more than you talk. The goal of making amends is to replace hurt and anger with forgiveness and love.
Revisit the Past
For those facing imminent death, the bulk of the conversation often focuses on medical needs, medications, or staff visits. While these are immediate needs are necessary, don’t forget the past. Revisiting old memories help us replace the current situation with one of our choosing — at least for a moment. Rather than a form of denial of death, recalling memories is an affirmation of our lives and our effect on others. For friends and family, recounting a past event is a handy way to show how a dying loved one impacted their lives. It’s often difficult for the dying person or loved one to find the right words in these moments. Words of condolence or regret can seem empty. But a pleasant or meaningful story can be a beautiful expression of our gratitude.
Recalling old memories is also a stimulating activity for Alzheimer’s patients. It fosters emotional connections and reduces anxiety. Use family albums, music, videos, or heirlooms to help prompt memories. Encourage family and friends who can’t travel or live too far away to send a short letter or audio recording. And don’t avoid humor. Include funny moments, old jokes, or humorous anecdotes. It may feel awkward at first, but laughter is nature’s way of helping us relieve stress and anxiety while connecting us.
Use Music Therapy
Studies suggest that music therapy has emotional and physical benefits for hospice and palliative care patients. Researchers found that patients who listened to music reported “less pain, anxiety … as well as an increase in feelings of well-being afterward.” Music therapy has a profound effect on people with cognitive and mental decline. The rhythmic nature of music requires little mental processing and helps stimulate memories. Choose music that your loved one enjoys, tunes from their childhood era, or a neutral New Age track. But don’t overstimulate; that can create stress. Take note of the other noises in the room. When mixed with many different sounds, even soothing music at a low volume to create a cacophony of stress.
Ask for Pain Medication When You Need It
Palliative care is about making patients feel as comfortable as possible until the end. And pain management and medication are part of this process. Unlike other vital signs, hospitals and staff can’t measure your pain. You have to help them know when you’re feeling discomfort. Still, some patients forego their pain meds because they want to stay awake to see their friends and family. Others see pain medication as “bad” substances or only for the weak or needy. But these are myths. Pain meds are integral to the palliative care process. And there’s no reason to forego pain medications that’s more important their your comfort. You may think you’re being strong for your family, but having to watch you fight intense discomfort will only increase their stress levels. Ask for pain medication when you need it.
These six tips will increase well-being and reduce stress when you’re nearing the end of your life. But once you’re faced with death, it’s important to know when it’s time to let go. Too often, we hold on too long out of a primal urge to keep going or fear of leaving our loved ones. Death is a natural process we all share. Take comfort in that immutable fact. Let your loved ones know you’re ready to go. They, too, will hold on to you, fearing that letting you go is “giving up.” This creates enormous amounts of stress. When it’s time, reassure them that — while you’re not ready to die — you have accepted it.
The booming hospice industry is changing what it looks like to die in the U.S. Rather than under the care of doctors and nurses in a hospital, more Americans than not now spend their final days in familiar surroundings, often at home, being cared for by loved ones.
While hospice has been a beautiful experience during a difficult time for many families, a yearlong reporting project by WPLN finds end-of-life support often falls short of what they need.
“Our long-term care system in this country is really using family, unpaid family members. That’s our situation,” says professor Katherine Ornstein, who studies the last year of life at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “As we increasingly see that we want to provide home-based care, we’re relying even more on caregivers. And it does take a toll.”
The federal government has found that families often misunderstand what they’re entitled to when they elect hospice. And many still have to pay out of pocket for nursing home services or private caregivers, which Medicare rarely covers — all while the hospice agency is paid nearly $200 a day.
Hospice has catapulted from a sector led by nonprofits and volunteers to one dominated by investor-owned companies — including several based in the Nashville area such as Amedysis and Compassus — with more growth expected.
In the process, hospice has ballooned into a nearly $19 billion industry. It’s now the most profitable service sector in health care, as the industry’s business model relies heavily on unpaid family caregivers.
“This seems like it’s in sync with patient-centered care,” says Ornstein, “but the reality of that situation may be very, very challenging.
“I think we have a responsibility to really think about whether the families can handle this.”
‘A Longer-Term Thing’
The Fortners could be the poster family for hospice of old. On an overcast morning last May, they gathered with dozens of other grieving families at Alive Hospice’s residence in Murfreesboro for the nonprofit agency’s annual butterfly release.
McCoy Fortner, 8, opened a triangular box and a dormant monarch began to twitch.
“You can also whisper to it to tell the person in heaven what you want to say,” he explained.
He held the winged messenger on his forefinger until the black and orange wings perked up and stretched out. He relayed a few words to his father, Jeremy, who died two years ago of cancer.
“Thank you for being my best dad,” he said as the monarch took flight.
McCoy’s mom, Elicia, stood behind her son with tears in her eyes. Her husband called off endless chemotherapy. He was on hospice at home and then moved to a residential hospice facility where he passed away. Between the two, he was on hospice for 10 days.
Elicia Fortner said she just wishes they had stopped curative treatment and switched to hospice sooner.
“I don’t know if I really understood the options,” she said. “I didn’t realize hospice could be a longer-term thing.”
The Hospice Nudge
The average amount of time patients spend on hospice has been creeping up steadily, amid an industry-wide push that has aligned most of the interests in health care. The Affordable Care Act gave hospitals new incentives to reduce the number of deaths that occur in the hospital or shortly after a patient’s stay. Some studies suggest that’s caused an uptick in hospice use. And many doctors have been sold on the idea of prioritizing quality of life in the final days.
More patients are also eligible: Hospice has expanded beyond cancer to any terminal illness.
Very few people now die in a hospice facility. More often, hospice is received at home or, increasingly, in a nursing home.
Jessica Zitter, an emergency physician in Oakland, Calif., wrote a book about needlessly dying in the hospital on ventilators with very little consideration about quality of life. She advocates for prioritizing comfort care, which often means recommending hospice. When a patient has been told they have less than six months to live, Medicare and most private insurance will allow them to sign up for hospice services meant primarily to help them die in peace.
Zitter filmed one documentary called “Extremis.” It showed the impossible end-of-life decisions that have to be made in a hospital.
Then, she decided to make a second documentary, still in production, following a husband who took his wife home on hospice after ending cancer treatment.
Zitter met with Rick Tash and Bambi Fass for the nine weeks she spent in at-home hospice. The storyline didn’t play out as expected.
“It made me realize how naïve I — the doctor of death — was,” Zitter says. “This is this beautiful love story of these two people. Then you hear him say, ‘I didn’t sign up for this.’”
Tash became overwhelmed — from managing Fass’s morphine doses to getting her to the toilet every few hours.
With at-home hospice, everyday caretaking — and even many tasks that would be handled by professionals in a hospital or nursing home — are left to the family.
Medicare requires agencies to provide a few baths and a nurse check-in each week. But government data reveals that, on average, a nurse or aide is there at the house only about half an hour a day.
Zitter sat Tash down at his kitchen table, with his granddaughter on his lap. She encouraged calling in reinforcements.
“Asking for more support from hospice, if you need it, is really important,” she told him.
“Yeah, but what they offered me was a volunteer for two hours, one day a week,” Tash responded.
“That’s it?” Zitter asked.
“That’s what they offered,” Tash said.
Zitter was stunned. She realized Rick was getting all hospice had to provide, and it wasn’t nearly enough.
“The good death isn’t as easy as you might think,” she says. “We’ve got to put some things in place here so we can make it more likely that people can achieve that.”
Two brothers are combining palliative care expertise, linguistics and AI to encourage more effective conversations between doctors and people receiving end-of-life care.
Hospitals track infection rates, bed occupancy and many other measures. Why not good conversations, too?
One afternoon in the summer of 2018, Bob Gramling dropped by the small suite that serves as his lab in the basement of the University of Vermont’s medical school. There, in a grey lounge chair, an undergrad research assistant named Brigitte Durieux was doing her summer job, earphones plugged into a laptop. Everything normal, thought Bob.
Then he saw her tears.
Bob doesn’t baulk at tears. As a palliative care doctor, he has been at thousands of bedsides and had thousands of conversations, often wrenchingly difficult ones, about dying. But in 2007, when his father was dying of Alzheimer’s, Bob was struck by his own sensitivity to every word choice of the doctors and nurses, even though he was medically trained.
“If we [doctors] are feeling that vulnerable, and we theoretically have access to all the information we would want, it was a reminder to me of how vulnerable people without those types of resources are,” he says.
He began to do research into how dying patients, family members and doctors talk in these moments about the end of treatment, pain management and imminent death. Six years later, he received over $1 million from the American Cancer Society to undertake what became the most extensive study of palliative care conversations in the US.
The resulting database contains over 12,000 minutes and 1.2 million words of conversation involving 231 patients. This is the basis of the Vermont Conversation Lab, which Bob created to analyse this data and find features of those conversations that make patients and family members feel heard and understood.
Brigitte’s job in the lab that summer was simple: listen to moments of silence and categorise them. The idea was that they could indicate emotionally charged connections between doctor and patient. Once the silences were coded, they would be used to train a machine-learning algorithm to detect them automatically – and, with them, moments of emotional connection.
You might ask what place algorithms could possibly have in this sensitive realm. The reality is that healthcare communication needs help, especially in palliative care, where practitioners seek to bring patients to their deaths as meaningfully and painlessly as possible.
In 2014, the US Institute of Medicine made improving doctor-patient communication a priority in its landmark study, ‘Dying in America’. An analogous publication in the UK, Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care, emphasised the need for patients, family and caregivers to have “the opportunity for honest, sensitive and well-informed conversations about dying, death and bereavement”. It reiterated that doctors need to make those conversations possible.
Most of the resulting communications training seems to offer scripts and templates to help doctors deliver bad news and make decisions with patients. But this is not enough. In this context, doctors really need to understand conversations more broadly. They need to appreciate everyone’s role in a conversation. They need to learn the ability to listen and be silent. They need to confidently recover from conversational missteps.
“Oncologists are in general very uncomfortable with this kind of thing. They want to focus on treatment, and they talk eloquently about different protocols and clinical trials,” says Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, a programme director in the Behavioral Research Program at the US National Cancer Institute. She oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life. “But sitting in the place of being a listener is not something that clinicians are trained for or necessarily comfortable doing.”
End-of-life medical conversations also often involve language in extremis.
Enter Bob Gramling. Hospitals track infection rates, bed occupancy and many other measures. Why not good conversations, too?
Amiable and serene, wearing a bracelet of Buddhist meditation beads, Bob sees a big role for artificial intelligence (AI) that can detect and measure the features of clinical interactions that matter to patients, then report those measurements to numbers-oriented healthcare systems.
Once such technology is widely available, he says, “we can incentivise our hospitals to build systems to improve those interactions and reward doctors for doing it”.
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“How are you?” asks the nurse practitioner, who’s just come into the patient’s room.
“Fine,” the patient says. She’s a 55-year-old white woman with stage 4 breast cancer. Neither she nor the nurse practitioner know that she’ll be dead in five days.
“No, you’re not,” the nurse practitioner retorts.
“Oh, a loaded question,” the patient laughs.
“It’s been a long – well? No,” says her spouse.
“No,” says the patient. “It’s a polite question, it’s a polite answer.”
This is a snippet of a conversation in Bob’s database that he played to his brother David, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona. David recognised the dynamics of this specific moment. The people in that room hadn’t been talking about care or disease, but they had been doing something important in the conversation that would affect the quality of the care.
When the Gramlings’ father died, David flew home from a literature studies fellowship in Berlin. But years earlier, he’d been intimately involved as a caregiver, witnessing a “smörgåsbord of insane, irrational communication failures” with lawyers, nurses, nutritionists and priests.
For a year after their father’s death, the brothers were swallowed by family matters. As they emerged, they began talking about palliative care communication and linguistic research in healthcare settings, and began to collaborate professionally.
The most recent result is a book, Palliative Care Conversations, published in early 2019. It aims to show physicians how conversations work, such as how clinicians and patients often understand words and phrases differently. David looked at the conversations at a granular level, using the tools of a linguistic subfield called conversation analysis. He spent years listening to audio recordings of the conversations, noting moments worth closer analysis.
Meanwhile, Bob provided clinical details about medical culture. In the last few years, he has also hung out with jazz musicians, who are master communicators when they’re improvising, and visited the Stanford Literary Lab to see how digital tools can be applied to massive literary corpuses to understand patterns too diffuse for human readers to catch.
Research on end-of-life communicating and decision-making typically looks at what doctors or nurses say. It rarely takes into account the deeper linguistic and cognitive factors that influence patients’ abilities to communicate in the first place.
As the Gramlings note in the book, the above back-and-forth between patient, spouse and nurse practitioner is remarkable for a first exchange between strangers. They explain that’s because “the clinician is willing to risk conventional rapport-building pathways by contradicting the family member’s self-reported state of mind”. In other words, the physician has opened the door to a looser mode of relating – and it works.
Another conversation doesn’t go as well. It’s a “pragmatic failure”, as David would say.
“When I came in,” says the nurse practitioner, “I saw you were watching Scrubs.”
“Scrubs?” the patient says. He’s a 63-year-old black man with stage 4 kidney cancer, who will live for 135 more days.
“Have you ever seen Scrubs?” asks the nurse practitioner, who is white.
“Yeah,” the patient says. “No, I wasn’t watching Scrubs.”
As the exchange unfurls, it’s clear the patient and clinician won’t connect. The clinician then seems to want to force their way to the task at hand, and forget the small talk where rapport could be built.
“When you study communication in healthcare, you’ll see a lot of monologues from doctors,” Bob says. “I don’t mean that in an insulting way – it could be really good information.” In palliative care, he explains, conversations are different: “It might be just because it’s the nature of palliative care. It’s what we do and what our value is… there is a lot of turn-taking.” That’s another term he learned from his brother. It refers to the back-and-forth of conversation.
“This is not a clean, rational, logical experience that fits on an 8-and-a-half-by-11 piece of paper, it’s a human-engaged relational endeavour,” he adds. “If we’re going to develop metrics for that, we’d better be looking at both the beauty and the science from many angles.”
Research on end-of-life communicating and decision-making typically looks at what doctors or nurses say. It rarely takes into account the deeper linguistic and cognitive factors that influence patients’ abilities to communicate in the first place.
One study, by speech-language pathologists in the late 1990s, showed just how large these language challenges can be. They gave a battery of language comprehension and memory tests to 12 hospice patients: 11 of them couldn’t recall words, had difficulty understanding things and pronouncing words, and had difficulty remembering what was said to them. These symptoms get in the way of normal activities, like having conversations.
Even something as crucial as how well older patients can hear gets overlooked. In a 2016 survey of 510 hospice and palliative care providers across the US, 87% of them said they did not screen for hearing loss, even though 91% of them agreed that patients’ hearing loss impedes conversation and negatively affects the quality of the care they receive. Only 61% said they felt confident nonetheless that they could deal with patients with hearing problems.
The Gramlings pay a remarkable amount of attention to another factor: the pain, shortness of breath, fatigue and medications that can keep patients from communicating normally.
In his research, David has addressed what he calls “language in extremis”: what happens when people’s ideas about language and communication buckle under the strain of circumstances, as in multilingual experiences in Nazi concentration camps, or interpreting in border patrol detention facilities.
End-of-life medical conversations also often involve language in extremis. As cancer brings a person’s life near to its end, they may have lost some of their lifelong communicative powers to the disease or its treatments. They may have less ability to speak subtly and indirectly, which is important for politeness. Shallow breathing shortens utterances, and drugs may block word-finding. All of this reinforces an asymmetry in communication that doctors don’t always grasp.
At the end of a patient’s life, there may not be effective medical treatments, just things to discuss and plans to make.
A physician might encourage a patient to speak openly, and indicate their willingness to listen, but in practical terms, “That gesture doesn’t quite work,” David says, and doctors need to understand why.
At the same time, people still hew to lifelong social conventions about being a user of their language. They might be dying, but “They don’t back away from their interactional responsibilities,” David says. They honour turn-taking; they don’t interrupt. They tell jokes, they use family language, and they create mini-rituals of inclusion and exclusion, often to deal with the communication asymmetries.
“If I were picturing the developmental arc,” says David, “it wouldn’t be coasting down into death. It would be all the way and sometimes heightened. The kind of complex literacy you need to use in a hospital setting in a serious illness, and managing all your oncological terms – it’s almost like the competencies themselves get expanded in this end of life.”
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In his lab, Bob is examining even more fleeting aspects of conversations, such as pauses. It’s an interesting choice, because pauses might be considered as a sign that a speaker has lost their way or that an interaction is breaking down. On the other hand, pauses are easy to locate in the acoustic signals of recorded conversations. And they might indicate where someone is listening or about to say something important, so they might be a good thing.
Bob’s team used machine learning to identify pauses of 2 seconds or longer in spoken conversations, then human coders like Brigitte Durieux tried to categorise them, looking for ones that were more than just silence.
Because they didn’t have access to what the doctors or patients were actually thinking, they looked for the presence of emotional words and other sounds like sighs or crying on either side of the pause. Did a question about the quality of life, treatment hopes, prognosis or dying precede the pause? If so, the pause may have been because the doctor invited the patient to consider something.
The team found that during some of these pauses, some connection, shift or transformation was occurring. These “connectional silences” were rare. Out of a set of 1,000 clips with pauses, a mere 32 were connectional in nature. They were brief, as well, most lasting less than four seconds. But there’s still power in them.
The dynamics of a conversation change dramatically after such a connectional silence. Suddenly, a patient will be talking more than they did earlier. They’ll be directing the conversation, not the doctor. It’s as if the mutual agreement to pause for two seconds spilled into an agreement to shift roles.
“No, for some reason I guess I just in my head was gonna be on [chemotherapy] for the rest of my life and everything was gonna be hunky dory and…” a patient begins.
A 2.9-second connectional silence follows. The doctor inhales audibly, to signal they will respond, which makes the patient pick back up.
“You know. I knew early on, I mean you told me early on it’s not like and then this will be the rest of my life. Something, you know, might go down.”
The doctor responds. “Something. That can be a very hard thing to think about. That here we found something that’s helping but you can’t stay on it for the rest of your life.”
In other moments, the silence comes after a doctor has said something empathetic.
“It’s rare of me to tell somebody point-blank you’ve got to stop. However, I will say you have my permission to set limits,” the doctor says.
“Okay,” says the patient, then falls silent for nearly seven seconds.
His wife chuckles. “He can’t stand the thought of it. I can tell by his laugh,” then she laughs.
“I know he can’t stand the thought of it,” the doctor says.
“No, that’s okay,” the patient says. “I’ll get used to it.”
Or in another instance, the doctor tells a patient’s spouse, “what you feel is really hard. It’s really hard.” There’s a 2.8-second silence.
“I just wish he had a better quality of life.”
“I know, I know,” says the doctor.
Even though these connectional silences don’t happen often, Bob thinks they’re good linguistic markers of connection exactly because doctors don’t commonly use them. When someone good at monologuing and interrupting falls silent, it may mean they’re allowing something else to happen.
Bob surmises, “More often than not, the conversations that have a lot of space in them are probably going to lead to people feeling more heard and understood.”
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Judy had a question. Having come to the hospital at the University of Vermont to recover from the flu, this elegant, 83-year-old woman was lying in her bed. Two doctors had come to her room bearing news. It was cancer, not the flu, and it had spread from her liver. She could undertake a course of chemo, or she could have her pain managed as she died.
She turned to her daughter, Kate, sitting beside her. “What should I do?” she asked.
When the doctors had requested this meeting, Kate had dropped everything to be there. It seemed unusually serious. Now she knew why. She wondered why she hadn’t seen the signs of her mother’s cancer. Judy’s skin had started to look yellow, she recalled. But instead of recommending a check-up, she bought her mother some pinker make-up.
In this pivotal conversation, the doctors presented the options but also wanted to know what was important to Judy. They knitted the science together with thoughtfulness and compassion. Kate was struck by their slow, almost languid approach to delivering the news.
Slowly it dawned on her that this was a conversation about her mother’s death. Neither of them had prepared for this. Not now, not so soon.
“It had the nature of a conversation with a clergyperson rather than a doctor,” she remembers. Pastoral kept coming to mind.
At the end of the conversation, one of the doctors gave her his card. It was Bob Gramling. Kate has since seen the bright blue spectrographs showing gaps in conversation – where the pauses occur. She thinks these are important moments as well.
“Where there’s silence, where there are gaps, that’s where the caring shows up,” she says. “I think it’s incredible work to point out to doctors there’s a lot going on in the silences.”
Bob and David have only scratched the surface of how these conversations work. So far they have only studied English speakers, for example; pauses work differently in other cultures, so they need data on those moments, too. And because their data comes from people with cancer, there’s a concern that the analysis may be skewed.
With cancer, says Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou of the National Cancer Institute, most patients have time: “They continue to be themselves and continue to be part of the conversation and any ongoing discussion.” With other diseases, though, there could be more risk that the person would “lose cognitive function or physical function”. In those cases, she says, conversations “would look very different”.
Healthcare’s use of natural language processing – technologies that treat language as data – is expanding, and the chances are good that research like that of the Gramlings will expand to cover conversations with people who have other serious illnesses.
What is a conversation?
Bob isn’t the only researcher exploring the use of artificial intelligence in palliative care. In 2017, James Tulsky, a palliative care physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and a Harvard professor who studies health communication, stressed that “mass-scale, high-quality automated coding will be required” to give feedback that helps clinicians improve their expressions of empathy.
Tulsky turned to Panayiotis Georgiou, a computer engineer at the University of Southern California, to develop automated detection of emotional connections between doctors and patients. In 2017, a team headed by Georgiou showed that certain acoustic features of the speech of couples in counselling could be used to predict marital outcomes. What if algorithms could do the same for palliative care conversations?
“The technology in theory exists out there to do all this,” Tulsky says. “It’s just a matter of doing enough research, running enough iterative trials, training up the machines to actually get these algorithms trained well enough so you could apply them to more random talk.”
I ask Judy’s daughter Kate what she thinks of using artificial intelligence to enrich human connections. “I wouldn’t worry about the technology,” she says. “The more technology, the more sacred the conversation becomes.”
What does she mean? Anything that enables humans to use their voices more effectively with each other is a good thing, she explains: “It’s because of the increasing technology that the interaction becomes more wonderful.”
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What is a conversation? It’s a setting where humans interact, often for a purpose but sometimes for none at all. People have to learn how to have conversations but when they become expert in their culture’s conventions, conversing becomes so automatic it feels natural.
Modern healthcare has hijacked conversation and made it a tool by which physicians can achieve their ends.
According to David, “The contemporary hospital still understands ‘conversation’ as ‘making a pre-determined X happen through conversation’.” This is a barrier in serious illness and end-of-life care, where the conversations need to be venues for figuring out what the X might be.
At the end of a patient’s life, there may not be effective medical treatments, just things to discuss and plans to make. This may need a more natural conversation than a medical one, a conversation in which none of the participants may know what the outcome will be.
After all, these conversations aren’t just for doctors; they’re for patients, too. And family members, nursing aides, housekeeping staff. “There are a lot of human beings who have a vested interest in this other human,” Bob says.
There are critics who don’t think artificial intelligence and machine learning have a role to play in palliative care. Bob’s view is that shying away from analysing this kind of conversation in this way means that essential opportunities for improving it will be missed.
“It is helpful, as a discipline that has historically thought of communication as just the art of medicine, to actually think that, no, this is a science,” he says. And understanding that science could help us re-engineer the healthcare system to support more meaningful conversations.
He’s aware of the delicacy in institutionalising and commodifying a human interaction, though. “As a physician,” he says, “I was afraid of being a researcher that was going to oversimplify this kind of sacred experience into something that’s measurable and convenient and essentially meaningless.”
That’s where Brigitte Durieux struggled with her feelings as she listened to thousands of audio clips of pauses. In some conversations, people were laughing, but she was struck by the loneliness in others. She had begun to recognise patients’ voices and wondered what had happened to them.
“Nobody is perfect, but there are times when one realises there’s something that could be said to make this feel less like a loss,” she says. Sometimes she whispered under her breath something the doctors could have offered instead.
After Bob found Brigitte crying, he wrote an ethics proposal to the hospital so that he could introduce a new procedure into his lab. He borrowed an idea from the hospital’s palliative care unit, where staff gather every week to say the names of people who have died, then ring a singing bowl.
Now, at the start of every Vermont Conversation Lab meeting, a researcher reads the name of one of the patients from the database and rings the bowl. So far, they have gone through the list of names twice.
The ceremony helps, says Brigitte, because it reduces the guilt of turning a sensitive moment in someone’s life into a piece of data.
“What it does ultimately,” she says, “is recognise the humanity of things.”
Michael Micallef had lived with Huntington’s disease for nearly three decades. In July, he chose to die by medically assisted death in the backyard of a close friend in Toronto.
As Michael Micallef’s body began to fail, a thought persisted in his mind — he didn’t want to die slowly, the way his father had.
For nearly three decades, the Toronto man had been living with Huntington’s disease. The hereditary, neurodegenerative illness had taken Micallef’s father about a decade before, and now, it was taking him.
As it progressed, his motor skills, speech, ability to read, and even Micallef’s ability to sleep were all faltering.
“He said he really [regretted] he didn’t have the courage to kill himself,” he said of his father.
That’s one of the reasons why on July 7, at the age of 69, the Toronto man and his wife, Vickie, held a party to celebrate his life before Micallef’s medically assisted death later that evening.
Surrounded by his closest friends and his wife of 48 years, Micallef got to say goodbye on his own terms during a party at his condo building.
Alongside dozens of guests, he enjoyed some of his favourite food — cinnamon buns, mangoes, and Whole Foods rotisserie chicken.
“This can be good for everybody. Not the result, but the process,” Micallef said. “Being able to have choices is extremely important to me. Not to others, but it is to me.”
According to the Office of the Chief Coroner, there were 1,593 medically assisted deaths in Ontario between June 30, 2018, and June 30, 2019.
Since the procedure was legalized in 2016, there have been more than 3,300 medically assisted deaths in the province, statistics show. The coroner’s office says that in Ontario, roughly 1.5 per cent of all deaths are now medically assisted.
It’s something Micallef considered ever since his diagnosis, nearly 30 years ago — but it wasn’t truly a possibility until the procedure became legal.
For Micallef and his wife, his decision to die wasn’t a cause for sorrow. His party was a celebration — of life, love, and memories made. There was a steady parade of hugs from well-wishers, along with hopes for an easy passage.
His brother, sister and cousins came. Friends surrounded Micallef to wish him well.
“I said to him, ‘Do you realize how lovely this is? Michael we are going to have a farewell party … when you go to wherever the next stage is, you’re going to know how people feel about you,'” Vickie said.
“This is a blessing.”
‘Little explosions’ in his brain
Micallef attended St. Michael’s College School through his teen years, where a voracious love of reading took hold, alongside a passion for competitive hockey.
Later in life, his job with furniture company Herman Miller had taken both him and his wife to England, Singapore and Michigan, before landing back in Toronto.
The pair did not have children. They had a large group of friends, extended family and associates all over the world.
In Micallef’s last days, he could barely read, or even sleep. He struggled to speak. His quality of life was plummeting.
Micallef’s wife, Vickie, said she said goodbye to him 10 years ago because his personality had changed. ‘The man I married hasn’t been with me for a long time,’ she said. The couple, pictured here in 2008, were married for 48 years.
“He told me, ‘My brain is starting to have little explosions in it and my muscles are starting to have little explosions,’ which means he’s going to the next stage,” Vickie said.
Huntington’s disease is an illness that causes certain parts of the brain to die, and results in physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms.
Patients lose weight, have diminished co-ordination, and difficulty walking, talking and swallowing. They can also face symptoms like depression, irritability, and obsessive behaviour.
Saying goodbye
According to the Huntington Society of Canada, people in advanced stages of the disease can no longer manage the activities of daily living, and need professional care.
Micallef wanted none of that.
“I think I said goodbye 10 years ago to Michael because the personality changed, so the man I married hasn’t been with me for a long time,” Vickie said.
Micallef’s family says he had a successful sales and management career. He was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease in his 40s. His father also had the genetic disease. After watching his decline, Micallef didn’t want to go through the same.
Last month, in a friend’s backyard in the city’s Leaside neighbourhood, a nurse injected Micallef with a sedative. Then a doctor administered a substance to end his life.
He died while reclining on a lawn chair, with his wife next to him.
“We had a lovely little chat before he left,” Vickie said.
“I know he’s in a better place. I know his fight — I know his pain — is over with.
“I tell people Michael’s soul is now soaring through the universe, happy to be out of the broken body.”
When Patricia Cassidy was at her lowest point, she had just been evicted, was overwhelmed with mounting medical bills, and was suffering from a traumatic brain injury that left her emotionally unable to cope with everyday tasks. Then her despair turned to fear as she found herself before a local judge, who mandated that she would have to cede control over her financial and medical affairs to a guardian — an organization that the court would task with managing many components of her life on her behalf.
“I went to the hearing, and it was very, very scary for me,” she recalled in a recent interview. At the time, her therapist and rheumatologist had petitioned the court to place her in a special public guardianship program for people without other means of support from family or friends. But Cassidy, a 59-year-old domestic abuse survivor facing several chronic ailments, feared losing her independence. “I was afraid of guardians,” she said. “I felt that they were going to come in and take over my life and take over everything I had and get rid of it all.”
Five years later, Cassidy said that what she most feared about guardianship — losing control — hasn’t happened. Instead, she’s stayed independent, living in a Brooklyn apartment her case worker helped secure. She now sees her guardianship, administered by the nonprofit advocacy group Vera Institute of Justice, as “just a part of my life.” But her program is part of a small, unconventional support network for extremely vulnerable seniors that aims to safeguard their lives without taking them over. For hundreds of thousands of other seniors, guardianship is an ethical gray zone, operating at the heart of a question that increasingly haunts an aging nation: When am I no longer able to care for myself?
Aging Gaps
Guardianship is one of the most ethically fraught aspects of the elder care system, hinging on the most sensitive questions about personal liberty, medical responsibility and kinship. And it all starts, for better or worse, with a judge’s decree. A court appoints a guardian when a senior is deemed unable to live independently, usually after a hearing process that reviews an individual’s medical needs or physical, intellectual, mental or psychological disabilities, and determines that guardianship is appropriate. Similar to adoption, the guardian is in most cases a relative or friend who petitions for them. But people with fewer resources might end up in the care of a public or private agency, which is tasked with managing issues like medical treatment, financial planning and end-of-life care.
Overall, about 1.5 million people nationwide are in some form of guardianship, more than three-quarters of them involving a relative. Seniors without friends or relatives who are willing to help manage their affairs may enter the care of a private guardian (who is generally arranged by family or friends and compensated directly), if they have the financial resources to do so. Elderly people who don’t have enough funds to finance their own guardians can enter a separate system known as public or community guardianship, provided by a nonprofit or government agency. But as a whole, court-appointed guardianships lack central regulation or monitoring. Advocates fear that as the Baby Boom generation ages and guardianship becomes more widespread, so will the potential for abuse or neglect.
The Vera Institute’s The Guardianship Project (TGP) is trying to get courts and communities to reimagine guardianship, both through research and advocacy and through running its own guardianship model, which now serves about 180 people across New York, including Cassidy. On a national level, TGP’s research on guardianship programs in several states suggests the system is letting many seniors fall through the cracks: Surveys of judges and other court personnel, along with professional guardians, indicate that many courts are overstretched; there is little monitoring of cases, and judges often lack expertise for handling complex cases of seniors with serious health and economic issues. Meanwhile, court-appointed guardians are in many cases attorneys, who might have no expertise in caregiving, and respondents reported a lack of guardians available with skills like social work and nursing.
“Basically, what the whole story is showing is that there’s a population of elderly, disabled and/or poor people that are largely invisible and largely ignored,” said TGP Director Kimberly George.
Meanwhile, public wariness of guardianship is growing: Media reports and government audits have revealed many cases plagued by dysfunctional bureaucracy and a pattern of elder abuse. In professional private guardianships, which often take in seniors who have some assets to pay for services, scandals have erupted in cases of neglect, exploitation or abuse of elderly people. But the poorest seniors are even more vulnerable, since their fate relies completely on the courts and public welfare systems. Poor, socially isolated seniors with complex care needs often find themselves assigned to a public or community guardian that is financed by public funds, but without adequate resources for care and legal services. According to Peter Strauss, an elder law attorney and professor at New York Law School, when funding is arbitrary and inconsistent, guardians, public or private are frustrated by “underfunding, short staff, and then they get overwhelmed with the number of cases that they can’t handle.”
“There’s a gaping hole in the system for folks who don’t have money, but who need help and don’t have anybody [who] can step in to pay their bills, make health care decisions and the like,” said Bernard Krooks, an elder law attorney who handles guardianship cases in New York. Although public guardianship programs could play a critical role for the most marginalized seniors, Krooks told Truthout, “The reality is, there has not been a funding mechanism in New York State to make this happen.”
Keeping Elders at Home
TGP’s model seeks to serve as a different kind of last resort, aiming to provide intensive services for seniors in economic hardship, with no family or friends available to serve as guardians. Funded by New York’s Office of Court Administration and other public and philanthropic funds, TGP serves clients across a range of settings, including residential care facilities, but aims to keep clients in their communities. Each client with a “wraparound team” that includes lawyers and other support staff, with specialists in managing public benefits, finances and housing. About half of the clients live at or below the federal poverty line, and half are people of color. About 60 percent of clients are living in their communities, while others live in residential institutions like nursing homes.
TGP’s multidisciplinary program intends to knit together different strands of the social infrastructure to help people avoid nursing homes and jails. If a client with mental health problems suffers a breakdown and gets arrested, TGP can provide legal representation to secure their release from jail and help connect them to a long-term treatment program that fits their needs. TGP can also support undocumented seniors by helping them obtain medical care and other services while avoiding immigration authorities and federal law that curtails non-citizens’ access to aid.
Until recently, Cassidy hardly fit the stereotype of an “incapacitated” elder. Earlier in her life, she had worked in public relation and museum curation, but over the years, her health deteriorated due to various chronic ailments and domestic abuse. Then in her mid-fifties, she was living on her own — just not very well. Her brain injury often triggered emotional outbursts; basic tasks like a visit to the bank could spiral into an angry breakdown. “I was very overwhelmed, and then therefore not able to even operate on the simplest level,” she said. Cassidy’s vulnerability was aggravated by estrangement from family members. “It was like I became an orphan at 50,” she said.
Her therapist and rheumatologist encouraged her to enter into the guardianship as a way of getting her life under control. A TGP case worker and other staff have helped her sort out her finances and secure a new apartment with a special housing subsidy based on her medical condition. While Cassidy is capable of making her own treatment decisions, her guardian also acts as an interlocutor. A conversation with a doctor can leave her “mentally fatigued,” she adds, but TGP staff “are there with me, and they’re talking to the doctor … then afterwards if they need to, [they] explain it to me five times — the doctor is not going to explain anything to you five times — [so that] I’m sure that it’s a good decision that’s being made.”
TGP works with individuals in residential institutions, but also helps them move back into their communities whenever possible. As the report explains, many clients become “stuck” in the medical system, “languishing needlessly in a hospital or nursing home,” unable to be discharged “because no one will take on the challenges of transitioning him or her back to their homes or to a less-restrictive setting with proper oversight.” Many guardians, George said, particularly those ill-prepared to deal with complex, high-needs clients, might be tempted to place a senior in a nursing home as an “easier” solution — eliminating the need for the guardian to worry about housing, food or managing the client’s bills.
When TGP steps in, the team prepares for a client’s return home by taking care of tasks like settling rent arrears with the landlord, or planning end-of-life care — services that the client would never be able to arrange while bedridden in a crowded rehab center. If a client’s condition deteriorates to the point that some form of institutionalization, such as placement in a nursing home, appears necessary, TGP would work to place them in the least restrictive setting, according to the study, perhaps seeking out a local facility “with staff who speak a client’s primary language and access to religious services and culturally familiar foods.”
Despite its personalized approach, a recent cost-analysis found that TGP’s budget saved its roughly 160 to 180 clients collectively about $3 million in annual Medicaid costs, primarily by avoiding placements in nursing homes.
The Vera Institute’s study suggests other counties and states can use a similar holistic approach to public guardianship. On the policy level, TGP’s study calls for an expansion of public guardianship nationwide — with additional funding, comprehensive monitoring of guardians and service providers, and enhanced regulatory standards, including a commitment to placing people in the least restrictive setting, and a staff-client ratio of 1 to 20 to ensure adequate resources and oversight. Overall, a more human-centered public guardianship program could enable the most vulnerable seniors to live more independently and stay close to their communities.
Safeguarding Elder Rights
Still TGP, with its limited capacity, is not itself a solution for the guardianship crisis. Some disability rights advocates criticize the concept of guardianship in general, viewing it as incompatible with the principle of independent living. They prefer alternative legal arrangements like “supported decision-making,” in which social service providers provide guidance for people on medical and financial decisions while still leaving them legally in charge of their affairs.
Meanwhile, progressive elder law advocates are also gravitating toward alternatives to guardianship that support independence whenever feasible. Alison Herschel, director of Michigan Elder Justice Initiative, says that while guardianship is necessary for some individuals, “we believe there are far too many guardianships and far too many cases that should have been resolved by utilizing less restrictive alternatives.”
The Vera Institute’s study urges court administrators to implement better training so courts can screen cases so people can opt for less restrictive options like supported decision-making. Instead of appointing a guardian for a senior with severe dementia, for example, a judge could arrange for a sibling to gain power of attorney to aid with medical or legal decisions, and provide a home health aide. Even when guardianship is strictly a last resort, the court process can be a framework for meeting a senior’s needs for both care and personal dignity, and providing support without threatening self-determination.
For Cassidy, the TGP guardianship model is not just about getting the right services, but regaining a firm sense of both her abilities and limits. Her guardian hasn’t taken over her life, as she had once feared; instead, it’s a stabilizing presence.
If she ever needs her case worker, she knows who to call. “I carry their card with me all the time.”
This approach to MS care focuses on quality of life and may be beneficial at any stage of the disease.
In recent years, there’s been a movement among many multiple sclerosis (MS) healthcare providers to integrate palliative care into their practices.
When most of us hear the term “palliative care,” if anything comes to mind, we probably think of hospice care — measures taken at the end of life to ease suffering and maximize comfort.
But palliative care is an approach that may be beneficial to anyone who experiences suffering due to a health condition, whether they’re just diagnosed or have lived with it for years. And it’s on the rise among MS care providers.
But as these numbers show, most people with MS still don’t have meaningful access to palliative care, and there are still many misconceptions among both doctors and patients about what palliative care involves and how it applies to MS.
Here’s what palliative care means in the context of MS, when and how it might be helpful, and how you may be able to incorporate it into your treatment plan.
What Is Palliative Care for MS?
Palliative care describes an approach to providing healthcare, rather than any specific type of treatment. While there’s no precise definition, experts agree that it means treating more than just symptoms.
“How do you maintain quality of life? That’s really the crux of what palliative care is,” says Rachael Stacom, an adult nurse practitioner and senior vice president of population health at Independence Care System in New York City. “It’s about comfort and relief of suffering.”
“The way I explain it is looking at ‘disease-centered’ versus ‘person-centered’ care,” says Benzi Kluger, MD, a neuropalliative care specialist at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and professor of neurology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora.
“In disease-centered care, the primary focus will always be on the patient, meaning a person defined by their illness,” says Dr. Kluger. “Whereas in palliative care, the primary focus is on people who can define their illness” and what’s important to them — including not just the patient, but also family members and any caregivers.
A palliative care approach, Kluger emphasizes, means “helping people with medical symptoms, but also with difficult emotions — things like grief, guilt, loneliness, caregiver burnout.” This approach can be adopted by many different kinds of MS healthcare providers, including neurologists, primary care doctors, and nurses, and it doesn’t require any specialized training in palliative medicine.
In addition to what’s known as primary palliative care — where the approach is a routine part of MS care — there are also specialized palliative care programs for people with advanced MS who need extra services focused on easing a large disease burden and getting optimal caregiver support.
Whether it’s provided as part of normal MS care or as a specialized program, palliative care means that providers and patients are discussing what they hope to accomplish together, and what to expect over time.
“Our goal is to help people anticipate if things are getting worse, and to have open and honest conversations about functional decline,” says Kluger, as opposed to focusing only on medical treatments aimed at slowing disease progression.
When Palliative Care Can Help for MS
Stacom helps oversee a community-based long-term care program for people with physical disabilities, many of whom have MS. But she says that palliative care can help people with MS long before they would sign up for a program like hers.
“For people with a potentially progressive neurologic disease, suffering happens right at the time of diagnosis,” she says. “Some people think that ‘suffering’ is a very strong word, but there’s a significant amount of stress” that comes with MS at all stages.
In this context, palliative care soon after an MS diagnosis means discussing, “What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to wind up in a wheelchair? It’s about allowing space for those conversations to happen, and understanding what that person values,” she says.
Kluger notes that many people are looking for a “road map” as soon as they receive an MS diagnosis. “They don’t want to be feeling their way forward one day at a time in the dark. They want more clarity around their diagnosis, and what to expect” he says.
But even if palliative care isn’t used from the beginning of MS treatment, it can be helpful later on, says Kluger. “As the disease progresses, there may be different triggers for either referral to a specialized palliative care program, or stepping up the palliative care approach.”
Several years into having MS, many people are struggling with pain or fatigue, greater disability or loss of mobility, or planning for a future in which they may need a caregiver, says Kluger. At this point, a palliative care approach can focus on managing symptoms that have grown more complex, and on managing difficult emotions.
When someone has advanced MS, a palliative care approach can focus on increased emotional support, supporting caregivers, and providing home help and other social services. If someone is near the end of life, it may also include hospice care.
At any point in this continuum, someone with MS may benefit from a specialized palliative care program — as described in an article published in October 2015 in Multiple Sclerosis Journal — “if they’re at a point where pain management or fatigue management goes beyond what their primary neurologist feels comfortable with,” says Kluger.
Someone with primary-progressive or secondary-progressive MS may choose to make a specialized palliative care program their main “medical home,” Kluger says, since there may not be much that a neurologist can do for them in terms of traditional disease management.
Kluger has found that at all stages of MS, palliative care can result in better symptom control, especially with pain and fatigue. Often, he says, patients report a better quality of life once they begin a palliative care approach to their care.
And when people with MS start having conversations with their doctor about their future, “they’re empowered to take more control over healthcare decisions” through advanced-care plans, preparing for potential hospitalizations, and eventually arranging end-of-life care in a way they see fit.
Getting Access to Palliative Care for MS
Unfortunately, most people with MS aren’t offered a palliative care approach by their regular healthcare providers. “Neuropalliative care is a relatively new field,” Kluger explains, and even if medical providers are receptive to the idea of palliative care, that doesn’t mean they offer specialized services, like home-based care.
For more people with MS to gain access to palliative care, there will need to be “a grassroots push to move the field towards this,” says Kluger. “I really encourage patients and families to talk to their doctors about it. They really see the need for this, oftentimes more than physicians do.”
Stacom believes that palliative care hasn’t caught on more quickly because, among other reasons, “it requires a power shift, where the person becomes the one leading the care, as opposed to the healthcare provider. And I think that’s a hard thing for us to do” as providers, she says.
But Stacom remains convinced that healthcare will move in the direction of palliative care, for MS and other conditions. “Person-centered care is where healthcare is going now. I think that as healthcare providers, we have a unique position to be a partner, and support people to lead a full life.”
Embracing the natural stages of the dying process through hospice care
By Lauren Glendenning
When patients need hospice care, family members and other loved ones often feel overwhelmed with emotion. A caring and supportive hospice team can help alleviate some of these feelings.
We asked Kristine Cooper, executive director of Home Health and Hospice at Memorial Regional Health, to help readers understand more about hospice care at MRH and how it affects patients’ families.
What are some ways that hospice care can relieve stress for those who may be in charge of an elderly loved one?
Kristine Cooper: Hospice really provides support not only to the patient but also to the caregivers. We have nurses that spend time with caregivers, educating them about the disease and dying process. We also have our LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) who spends time with the patient and caregivers, discussing end-of-life planning. She also works with caregivers and families to address anticipatory grief.
Are there any myths about hospice care you’d like to clarify?
One myth would be that hospice hastens death. Hospice really embraces the natural stages of the dying process and neither intends to hasten or prolong death. Our team partners with the patient and family on the journey. Another myth is that hospice is expensive. Medicare actually covers the cost of hospice, including medications to treat symptoms related to the patient’s terminal diagnosis as well equipment needed to care for the patient safely in their home.
Why is it important for families to know about hospice care?
Hospice is not about giving up hope, it’s about refocusing hope. With hospice, there is hope that pain and other symptoms can be managed so that loved ones can live their best life in their final days. Hospice also offers hope to families and caregivers by providing support during this difficult time.
When is hospice care is necessary?
Hospice is here for patients who have been diagnosed with a life limiting or terminal illness with a life expectancy of 6 months or less to live.
What kind of care do hospice patients receive?
Hospice provides nursing, emotional and spiritual support. Hospice can also provide support from physical, occupational and speech therapy with the focus of helping patients move safely. We also have volunteers that can provide companionship and assist with light housekeeping and cooking. All these different services make up the patient’s care team that works closely with their doctor. The overarching theme about hospice is that it is really about what the patient or family needs.
