Walk through the front door of the Guest House, as the project’s rambling Victorian home is known, and smell the strong coffee brewing or the homemade chocolate cookies cooling in the kitchen. The cookies aren’t just a nicety. According to Dr. B.J. Miller, the organization’s executive director, piquing the senses is a key strategy to dying well. “No future necessary when you’re in the moment,” he says.Another death-panelistic article in The New York Times, this one's called "Zen and the Art of Dying Well."
This place sounds exactly like the place that freaked out Frank Gallagher on "Shameless." What episode was that? Anyone know what I'm talking about?
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We should offer the dying a spectacular way to go out...who wants to go in a hospital bed waiting, waiting, waiting for the end to come? Not me!
How about like Jimmy Cagney at the end of White Heat?
Some percentage of folks might choose going out with a bang as opposed to "gently into that good night."
I hope that I can die quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather, and not yelling and screaming, like the passengers in his car.
I stopped watching Shameless years ago..the first two seasons were great though.
Dying is physically taxing for most people. A quick unexpected death you need some very rapid zen, which seems a contradiction. For the death of slow organ failure you will be using most of your energy to breathe. Morphine helps. It's a Zen drug.
Chocolate chip cookies??
That's the favorite trick of real estate agents to make a house feel like a home.
I live in the past perfect.
Baking cookies is always a good plan when conducting an open house.
For hospice, I don't know. I hope everybody got their 75 years in as Emmanuel recommends.
The best hospice care is at home.
For the $750 a day the Zen Hospice charges, I'd just as soon check into the Mandarin Oriental and dine at Per Se. If I have to go, I'd like to go in style.
Interesting. I sometimes read Erich Mariah Remarque (author of All Quiet On The Western Front).
He made something of a novelistic genre of stories centering on attractive young women who were dying of tuberculosis--in mountain sanitariums. One of the books were "Drei Kameradan" or "Three Comrades" written in about 1940. The second was "Heaven Has No Favorites" written in about 1962, and later made into a movie "Bobby Deerfield" starring Al Pacino.
Until streptomycin came along in 1944, there wasn't much of anything in the way of antibiotics to combat the effect of tuberculosis. Fresh air in the mountains or out in the desert (would you believe that there was a tuberculosis sanitarium in smoggy Los Angeles? There was--the Barlow Sanitarium.) along with a good diet was the only "cure". And the cure was rarely effective.
So you had large groups of people--some of whom would live for many years, and some who would die in a few short months waiting for the end.
Describing the female protagonists feelings as they struggle against their short term remaining future makes for some interesting novels.
Hospice is a modern approach, focused on a shorter time period. The folks are good at managing pain in terminal illnesses.
Rob
Problem. Mandarin is more than $750 a night. Ditto per se for more than one
Yes I remember that episode of Shameless. Don't remember the title of it. He was rightly freaked out and left.
Walk through the front door of the Guest House, as the project’s rambling Victorian home is known, and smell the strong coffee brewing or the homemade chocolate cookies cooling in the kitchen. The cookies aren’t just a nicety. According to Dr. B.J. Miller, the organization’s executive director, piquing the senses is a key strategy to dying well. “No future necessary when you’re in the moment,” he says.
Yes...note to self: amend living will to specify a hospice that serves beer.
Or another idea is to archive a Daily Blog for 30 years and reread the succor the week before the last leaf drops.
I vote for memories. Or three young top virgins...a blonde. a brunette, and a redhead to tell me how great I am...no, no make that two blondes and one brunette...no, no make that three TOP brunettes. Choices are hard with so little time left.
How do you focus on the present?
As soon as you get focused on the present, it's already past.
For someone who is dying, the future is jarringly known: death; the past, what difference does it make; the present, to live, as comfortable as possible, until the future comes.
Since the day we are born, the only known: the future is coming. How and when to get there is unknown.
Althouuse, why are you becoming a NYT conduit? There is a large increase in its presence which is dramatically diluting your work. I will spare you my NYT history but I quit reading the Sunday version in 1986 when it topped 4 pounds. A few years later I cut it back to Saturday only because that edition had no department store advertising, allowing the editors to publish all the stories of the week which were deemed interference with adverts. As its advertising declined in the 80s, Saturday died and I gave it up entirely.
You mean what everybody means nowadays… Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.
Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, Chap. 26
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