December 4, 2017
February 7, 2017
December 10, 2016
4-Dec-2017
The very first module for my medical humanities course is called "Good Death: Oxymoron or Possibility?" A good death implies a good dying time leading up to death. The question is, can dying ever be good or is this unacceptable given it is, after all, dying — the end o...
8-Nov-2017
There is a term used in the field of thanatology called "mortality salience." It comes out of a theory called "Terror Management Theory" that American social psychologists proposed based on the brilliant work of the cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, presented in...
22-Jul-2017
When death is in the house you feel the impermanence of life. When you feel the impermanence of life, you feel truth. When death is in the house, you have a keen sense of the present moment and it feels like wonder. When you are with a person in his dying time, there i...
29-Apr-2017
It starts with the denial of death. We are pretty sure that we won't die anytime soon so we don't give it much thought. Why obsess over it? It will happen one day, but not today. So, we make decisions about our lives that do not include dying. As far as figuring out wh...
19-Apr-2017
"To be or not to be, that is the question," Hamlet articulates in Shakespeare's play "Hamlet." We can reword this question for those of us in the grip of the medical industrial complex: To die or not to die, that is the question. We have achieved the capacity to stave...
11-Feb-2017
Thomas Fink: The thanatologist Deborah Golden Alecson is the author of Complicated Grief: A Collection of Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2014), We Are So Lightly Here: A Story About Conscious Dying (IntoPrint, Second Edition, 2014), Lost Lullaby (IntoPrint, Second Editio...