In Praise of Hospice Care

I had a grandfather and Heather had a grandmother who passed away under hospice care. Elizabeth Edward's recent death has brought the value of hospice care to the top of the news, and that is a good thing. In an article about her death, Eleanor Clift notes:


The experience made me a believer. Tom [Clift's husband] had endured all kinds of draconian treatments. When those treatments were exhausted, and the cancer was advancing, his oncologist suggested hospice. I remember being upset at first because I knew it was the end of the road, but it was time, and for someone whose death is inevitable and imminent, spending those last days at home is the gift that hospice offers. Its holistic approach to health care provides counseling along with pain medication.


Elizabeth was a champion of hospice, both the comfort it brings and the reality that it helped her face. She put it best in a statement meant for hospice and palliative care workers in the fall of '08 when she said, "Throughout my life, both personally and professionally, I have had the opportunity to see how people have been affected by illness and loss and the role the healthcare system may have played as they dealt with change in their lives. I also know that people can find a great deal of hope, even in the most challenging of life's situations. Hospice and palliative care professionals support and care for people at a time when hope can be hard to find. The professionals of NHPCO know more than I will ever know about providing that care; I know more than I wish I knew about receiving it, and I am happy to share my perspective with them."

End of life decisions are very difficult, complicated and heart-wrenching things. Hospice is probably the best option (when available) to provide pain mediation, the presence of family, and dignity.

Funerals Are A Pain

Funerals are a pain. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they are an annoying inconvenience – they are pain. They mark the passing of family or friend, and they stand as that public moment when we all grieve, love on each other, and make steps toward a new normal without the one we loved. As a pastor I sometimes get to watch as families deal with their loss while the pain is very fresh and sometimes the members of families are all at very different places at the same time. One thing I have never appreciated about some is their immediate tendency to try and brush aside the grief with something like, “at least they are in a better place.” Though that is true for those who die with Christ, and though that truth is part of the healing process, we ought not to short-circuit the process of death and grief so quickly.

A recent article in CT deals with the new book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come, by Rob Moll. In the article we are encouraged to think more about funerals as an act of spiritual formation and even community formation under Christ. We are, after all, people of a crucified and risen savior living in inevitable physical decay. We ought to therefore embody a community of resurrection – and remember that resurrection implies death. Rob Moll notes:

We live in a culture that has forgotten how to help people measure their days. Through medicine and science, we know more about death and how to forestall it than ever before. Yet we know little about how to prepare people for the inevitable. The church is a community that teaches people how to live well by teaching them how to measure their days. Put another way, when the church incarnates a culture of resurrection—one that recognizes the inevitability of death but not its triumph—it teaches people how to die well.

Have we become so obsessed with living well or living comfortably that we have lost sight of dying well as part of the spiritual act of the believer? If we have neglected this, does it betray a lack of confidence in the providential guidance of God in all seasons of life?

The article is very thoughtful, and I heartily recommend it.

Richard John Neuhaus - 1936-2009

The death of Fr. Neuhaus is a very sad thing for Christians in the public square. The long time editor of First Things and author of the always-anticipated “The Public Square” stood squarely for the orthodox core of the Christian faith in all of life. In a culture that (more often than not) mindlessly dismissed the power and relevance of the Christian worldview, Neuhause stuck out as its incisive and winsome defender.

His death has surprised me in how much it has moved me. I was not aware of the cancer that took him, and so I took the arrival of my journal subscription a little for granted. To me, he was a paragon of cultural engagement. As a pastor, I do a degree of that on a regular basis, but Neuhause was “always on.” He knew his world extremely well, he knew his theology and Christian conviction just as well, and he knew how to talk about the two deeply and seamlessly.

My prayer is that his role will be filled by many others. An individual can never be replaced, but they can certainly act as examples and guides. Right now, in a culture that is as unsympathetic to the Christian faith as our is, we need more and more thoughtful and provocative champions of the faith.

I will miss Fr. Neuhause.

The Leading Cause of Death In Spain

LifeSiteNews reports that the leading cause of death in Spain is now abortion. In a nation where there are no real restrictions on abortion, the report notes that, “the equivalent population of a mid-sized high school disappears every three days. Every twenty days the death toll equals the annual number of people killed in car wrecks. The total death toll, more than a million Spaniards since 1985, is the equivalent of multiple Spanish provinces.”

Some of the rest of the report:

Abortion is now the number one cause of death in Spain, and represents the most common type of violence against women in the formerly Catholic country, according to a new report by the international Institute for Family Policy (IPF).

The report, which was issued on the International Day of Violence Against Women, notes that Spain has one of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe, allowing women to kill their unborn child for "psychological" reasons at any time during their pregnancy.

Under Spain's practically nonexistent restrictions, abortions have more than doubled since the mid 1990s, climbing from 51,006 in 1996 to over 120,000 in 2007. The abortion rate is now approaching one in five pregnancies (18.3%), according to the report.

Although purely elective abortions are not technically legal under Spanish law, the vast majority (97%) were undertaken due to a purported psychological or physical risk to the mother.

Undercover investigations by Spanish media in late 2007 showed that abortion clinics in Spain maintain financial ties with psychologists who automatically issue assessments to abortion clinic customers stating that the woman is psychologically at risk from her pregnancy.

Our nation’s laws may be headed in the same direction with the likely enactment of FOCA (the Freedom of Choice Act). What is FOCA and what does it do? There is a great detailed description of it on the Between Two Worlds blog with links to the legal statues and legislation behind it all.

Bottom line, FOCA will eliminate all legislated restrictions on access to abortion, effectively putting us in the same legal boat as Spain. And as we now see with Spain, the old canard that the broader the liberty to chose abortion the fewer there will be, is totally without any merit.

HT: STR

A Precious Death

Standing there in the Critical Care Unit, it was sobering to watch her caress his hand, probably like she caressed it for years. He had died twenty minutes earlier, but she sat there surrounded by friends showing her love and devotion to her life-long husband the only way she knew how.

There is something precious about the passing of a life-long Christian spouse. It’s not easy; it’s not to be taken lightly. But there is something unique about it.

As their pastor, I was called in early in the morning while he was dying and had a chance to talk with family and friends and pray with him. He had just enough strength left to be aware of me for a little less than a minute. He listened to me as much as he could, and I learned again in that moment there is nothing small or flippant about prayer. They called again about three hours later to let me know he died.

Several times she said they were soul-mates, and no doubt they were. They were married to each other for decades—the example of the kind of marriage being lost at an alarming rate. Together they were committed to Christ and to their local church through thick and thin—an example of the kind of dedication to faith and community so rare in our Christian world right now.

So when he died, that is the kind of life he left behind. That is the kind of life she shared with him and stood as a monument to there in that hospital room. When she took his hand, it was a hand she knew. It was hers as much as it was his. She sat next to a man she knew and loved through every season in life, and though death separated them for the moment she still loved him.

And then there is our confidence in his faith in Christ. He died a child of God, which means he is no longer confined to that hospital bed connected to respirators, IVs and monitors. She knew, and we were able confidently to encourage her, he was with his Savior. The apostle Paul says we long for our heavenly dwelling as we groan under the weight of this life. As more of our friends, mothers and fathers exchange this life for the next, the more attractive our heavenly reunion becomes.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”
Psalm 116:15