We will all face painful moments sitting next to dying people. What can we say? — At 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, death announced it was coming for him. He was only eight years old; his cancer cells were not responding to treatment anymore. His body’s leukemic blast cell counts were doubling daily. Bone marrow was no longer making red or white blood cells, not…

I Tried To Give My Dying 8-Year-Old Son A 'Good' Death. Here's How. Since before he was born, we'd done everything we could to give our son a good life. Dad started socking away college…www.huffpost.com

In grief, every date on the calendar is the same: empty and cold — Wet, amber leaves litter the ground. The damp, wooded petrichor odors and chromatic hues filtering through dead branches remind me to pull out linen tablecloths and light candles. If it weren’t for the rotting forest catching up and tapping me on the shoulders, mirroring my insides, I’d forget to rummage…

This was us, stuck on a bus in Denali National Park eight years ago. The steep, winding Polychrome Mountain road had washed out. We waited for five hours inside the old, dusty uniform green bus as sludgy mud was plowed off the one-lane gravel road. We played card games and…

It’s what’s on the inside that counts — Ewan delighted in scheming up pranks and finding tricks to play even from a hospital bed. We’d been inside, inpatient for two weeks into treatment for Ewan’s refractory leukemia. Outside the world woke up to Spring. From the view through Forest Floor 7’s window, I saw rows of cherry blossoms…

I read The Design Legacy of Covid? It’s All Around You and got to thinking about the fingerprints past crises have left on my life. Think airport screenings and masks and QR codes. But rather than carefully sculpted scars, undesigned legacies came to mind. Undesigned legacies of past crises scatter…

What would you put in your time capsule for the pandemic? A time capsule for 2020 starts with a face mask. N95, surgical, cloth, bandana… Bandanas always remind me of a skit from summer camp. Clustered by cabins, we sit with our group on the grassy knoll rather than the splintery and hard benches which make ten minutes feel like forever…

It’s called Reflective writing. I participate in a virtual writer’s workshop led by Laurel Braitman. Laurel holds the official titles of PhD, Director of Writing and Storytelling, in a program known as Medicine and the Muse in the Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is also Adjunct Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative and…

What is Mutual Pretense? It is when everyone knows the party is over and the patient is dying, but all parties involved act otherwise. It is a masquerade of hope. It is denial and it is a burden. We owe medical honesty, awareness, and agency to our dying. This can…