The most important – and most difficult – conversation of your life, ironically, may be to tell your family and friends how you want to die.
“You need to have the conversation now, so you are not in a situation where emotions are intense, you are stressed, and a family member is having to make decisions for you instead of carrying out your wishes,” Paige Fletcher, of Aspire Health, told an audience at UTC last week. “We do a disservice when we use a ‘battle’ as a metaphor for fighting illness – It is not if we die, but how we die. Let’s talk about it now, before we are dying, before all of those emotions come in.”
“We live in a culture of denial of death,” said Tarron Estes, founder of the Colorado-based Conscious Dying Institute. “If you go to the doctor, eat good food, run a mile, get on the whatchamacallit – we are not saying it out loud, but there is something in our culture that says we can defy death.”
“We are starting to realize we’re not dying well in this culture right now,” Fletcher said.
Thursday’s panel discussion, sponsored by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga School of Nursing, focused on end-of-life decision-making.