JOURNEY HOME: Recent Episodes
Dan Gaffney
Journey Home is a collection of essays about living and dying with an open heart. While many of us fear death and dying, these essays argue that embracing these events can help us reclaim a richness we’re denied in a death-phobic culture. What’s more, opening our hearts can help us celebrate the preciousness of life and craft a life-affirming legacy for our families and loved ones. This is the journey we are all called to.
Patients who receive new treatments in clinical trials do little better than those on existing therapies.
Some diseases have a better prognosis than others but when the odds of survival are slim, health professionals can feel pressured to offer further treatments despite their low chances of success.
Our desire to live longer, even at the end of life, has driven a multitude of ways of averting death. Yet people who accept their prognosis and who choose palliative care are happier and live longer than those who pursue life-extending therapies.
Many of us are living long enough to become interested in adding vitality, meaning and life to our years rather than merely adding more years to life.
The removal of death and dying from our homes and families is eroding our affinity and kinship to events that have been seminal to culture since the dawn of humanity.
Death trails our lives as surely as night follows day, but many of us still feel shocked when the news comes that we or a loved one has a life-ending ailment.