Making Peace With Death & Dying

Advance Healthcare Planning Part 2: Why Filling Out Your Forms is Not Enough

Advance Healthcare Planning Part 2: Why Filling Out Your Forms is Not Enough In Part One of this article, I discussed why every mentally-competent individual over the age of 18 needs to have advance healthcare plans in place. Here we will…
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Is Your God Too Small?

As a mentor and grief counselor, I hear a lot about people’s deepest beliefs and fears and how they are challenged when life gets hard. I am particularly fascinated by how those who profess a belief in god integrate that belief into their…

When Critical Illness or Death Catches You By Surprise

An email I received from a reader provoked this article. She wrote "I'm 50 years old, sitting in a hospital room with my 43 year old husband, who is trying to recover from surgery for esophageal cancer. His diagnosis in early March sent me into…
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Living as Though Your Humanity, Mortality, and Divinity Really Matters

Is there anything we take more for granted than life itself? We are alive – what a miracle! But here’s the question – What are you doing with your life? Are you living it on the surface checking off endless to-do lists? When was the…

The Top 5 Things to Do When a Loved One Is Dying

I have far more I'd like to say on this topic than can be contained in a single post. So I will summarize my top five here and do follow-up articles on each of the five in the future series, What To Do When A Loved One Is Dying: Parts 1-5. 1.…

Giving Yourself a Basic Education About Funeral Planning NOW

If you had to plan a funeral for a loved one tomorrow, would you know what to do and what not to do?  Most of us are woefully unprepared when faced with this task and must do so while grieving the loss of someone for whom we care deeply. …

Do You Have a Healthy Attitude About Death?

Steve Jobs' last words, spoken with great delight, were, "Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!" What was he seeing? Perhaps what those returning from near-death experiences consistently report -- a sense of moving through a dark tunnel beckoned by a compelling…

Advance Healthcare Planning Part One: Not Just for Old People

There’s been a big push in recent years to educate the public about Advance Healthcare Planning (AHP). The focus has been primarily on the forms you need to fill out and why they are so important. But, there is so much more to it than…
Judith with her Mother

7 Tender and Magnificent Lessons That Death Can Teach Us

This is a picture of my mother, Grace Mundy, six months before her death in 2006. We shared a home during the final nine years of her life. Being her friend and caregiver through to her death was a walk through the valley of the shadow of death.…
Beautiful purple rose in a cemetery

Don’t Be Afraid to Touch Death

The centerpiece of the American culture of death is a taboo that inhibits our ability to encounter the territory of dying, death, and bereavement with wisdom, competency, and discernment. We are acculturated to fear and resist death. However,…

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