The posts you may find helpful when you or a loved one are in the last months or weeks of life are:
Sitting Vigil at a Death Bed: A Checklist This post gives you a list of things you could do to help ease the transition from life to the death of a loved one.
What is Hospice? How Do I Get It? Americans are not fully using their hospice benefits under Medicare or private insurance, oftentimes waiting until the last few days of life to enter hospice or palliative care when these programs are actually designed to take patients through the last 6 months of life and provide support for families/loved ones. This post explains the hospice benefit available under insurance and explains how to get hospice ordered for a loved one.
Visiting a Sickbed or Deathbed: What do you bring, do or say? It is very hard to visit someone who is sick or dying, we are often at a loss as to what to bring the patient, or what to say while visiting. This post offers numerous suggestions on how to visit a sickbed or deathbed, or if you cannot physically be present, there are suggestions on how you can bring happiness to them in other ways.
When Your Abuser or Abandoner Dies: How to Cope? If the person who is dying abused you, or abandoned you, and you hear that their death is imminent, what do you do? This post offers suggestions on how you can take care of yourself in these situations, protecting yourself while getting the support you need, and ideas on how to safely express long-repressed emotions of grief, fear, and sadness.
Is My Mom Dying? This post answers one of the most frequent questions I am asked in my law practice – family and friends do not recognize the physical signs of death and so they question the changes they see in their elderly loved one, wondering when death may happen.
What to Read to a Person Who is Dying? A reader left a question on my blog asking what they could or should read to someone who is on their deathbed. The first response was – ask the person who is dying if the want you to read to them. IF they say yes to you reading to them, ask what they want to hear. If you need suggestions on reading material, this post offers up several suggestions.
Death: Will it bring out the best or worst in you? As someone is dying, family and friends need to individually decide how they will act and cope in relationship with each other, not just with the person who is dying. This is a challenging time and this post suggests ways to think about setting goals around behavior.
In Death, Laughter is Allowed! In some deaths, there are moments that are just plain funny, and it’s okay to laugh when they happen. This post offers examples from my own life and experience with death which are just plain funny. Several comments from readers share additional stories of humor around the deathbed of a loved one.
How to talk about death? Death and our wishes for how we want to face the dying process are hard topics to bring up with people we love. This post offers suggestions on issues to cover as well as a way to start the conversation.
We Die the Way We Live This post explores how we each set the way in which we will face our own deaths by how we live our lives. This post is offered as a way to understand why some people face death head-on and make plans, and others just are not able to make plans for their own death and funeral.