Avoid Making Crisis-Driven Decisions.

I was honoured to be invited to Maureen Partridge’s home, to share my message with her
“nearest and dearest”.  I asked Maureen why this is so important to her: “After years of dealing with loss,
lots of different losses—probably no more than anyone else—we really started to notice something.
People were writing down instructions in the emergency room at the end of their life or shouting things from ambulances. We thought: This is CRAZY!!”

I had spoken a few times with you, more about end of life things with parents. But it seems like the lesson for my husband and I this summer, was that we would like to leave people so they can just grieve instead of dealing with details and figuring things out in the last hours.

Figuring things out in the last hour… it’s too stressful and it’s crisis-driven!
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It would be really lovely to have all the details in place so that people can just be sad, tell stories
and enjoy memories rather than trying to crack codes and figure out what people would have wanted.”
In Maureen’s career as a social worker, she has seen many families destroyed by grief. She adds:

Even in our family, in some ways with some recent losses, no one ever discussed how things should be, so people have very strong opinions. It would have been really nice to know what the person who is gone would have liked. We do not get out of this alive and everyone is dealing with loss all the time!

Grief is sometimes the price of living and loving, and it is worth it. And our hearts will heal if we take good care of ourselves and each other as we allow grief. And if we talk about, plan and prepare for grief, death and dying-long before it arrives- we can get to grieving and supporting each other…and suffer less.

Thank you, Maureen, for helping to create a culture of change so that we can
Live well, grieve well and die well.
 
Plan your Life, Plan your Death, then just...
Love Your Life to Death!
(And always bring your own tambourine to the party!)
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Any stories to share?
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