Happy New Year and welcome back to work! A lot of great news came in over the holidays I’d like to share with you.
The Association for Death Education and Counseling let me know that I’ve earned the CT designation, which means Certified in Thanatology: Death, Dying and Bereavement. I’ve been a death educator ever since A Good Goodbye came out in 2010. Now I’ve got the certification to prove it!
In yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal, an article on the front of the Health section was titled “Exit Strategies: New Mexicans advocate for more control over end-of-life choices.” The photo with the story featured yours truly at an earlier Death Cafe, with Lola in the background.
And Santa’s elves delivered 17 boxes of DVDs on Christmas Eve! All 12 episodes of A Good Goodbye TV interviews are now available in one boxed set. Bring the funeral planning conversation home and learn everything you need to know “before you go” by watching these expert interviews. Click here for more information.
Later today, I’m the guest for Eric Tonningsen’s Awakening to Awareness Internet radio show. The program is live on Tuesday, January 7 at 6:00 p.m. Mountain Time (8:00 p.m. ET | 5:00 p.m. PT) on the RockStar Radio Network. The show is all about “Realigning with what really matters.”
And tomorrow, my guest on A Good Goodbye Radio is Allison Copening with Seasons Funeral Planning Services. We’ll discuss how a funeral planning service is different from a funeral home and the changes her company and others like it bring to the funeral business.
Top Tips from the Last Live Show
Over the holidays, the radio show took a break. On the last live A Good Goodbye Radio show on December 18, my guests were Anita Brikman, Senior Vice President for Strategic Communications at NHPCO, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, and in the second half of the program, the guests were Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, co-authors of the new book, Changing the Way We Die: Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement. A few top tips from that show:
- You can shop around for hospice services before a medical crisis makes a quick uninformed decision necessary. Find information on how to compare providers at www.CaringInfo.org.
- Home hospice care relies heavily on families to be involved with patient care. If the situation is too stressful for the caregiver, inpatient hospice care is available in many markets.
- Pediatric patients on Medicaid can get “concurrent care,” which allows curative medical treatments along with palliative care to keep patients comfortable and out of the ICU.
- One of hospice’s best kept secrets is the range of bereavement care available for families after a patient dies.
Upcoming Events and a Humorous Quote
Click on the date to learn more about each event.
January 29: The Party No One Wants to Plan – film clip talk to the Military Officers Association of America
February 1: Albuquerque Death Cafe 2:30 p.m. Meetup Group
February 9: A Taste of Honey Talk – Show and Tell: Jewish Funeral Superstitions and Traditions
“All good things have an end. Except for sausages, which have two.” — Jean-Marc Minotte, known as Jean l’Anselme