Easiest “card” to send to someone in hospice care

Continuing on with the theme of hospice cards, an old interest of mine resurrected by the current patient advocacy of Regina Holliday, here is a simple way to let someone you know in hospice care that you are thinking of them.

For this idea, here’s what you need:

1. A computer with a camera attached (either built-in or plugged-in accessory)*[*you should know your software/camera capabilities: some snapshots will show the writing reversed, some won’t, so do a test first if you don’t know!]

2. An internet connection

3. A piece of paper, say about 8.5 x 11″ big. Your choice plain or fancified…

4. A pen, pencil, Sharpie, crayon — you want a thick line so the words are easily legible.

More examples for your own hospice card ideas

As promised in the first post on the hospice card theme on the 24th, here are a few more ideas of what I might like to hear from among my very varied friends (and consider writing your own legacy letter or ethical will, as well.)

“My dear friend! It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it? Never in a million years did we think we wouldn’t get to be old folks together, rocking out and scandalizing the neighborhood! Now who will I be misbehaving with? I love you! You have always, always made me laugh, and I am so very grateful for you in my life. I’m sending you a huge hug and here’s a picture of our first bloom of that flower you love so much.”

Hospice “cards:” remember the person’s sensory abilities

And another post in the hospice cards theme although I think the idea can also apply to your ethical will.  I have a friend who lost her vision some time ago.  But long before that, we had a fun, crazy time shortly after college that involved letters back and forth and Tillie Olsen‘s book Tell Me a Riddle.  Every few years, we’ll remember the silliness we wrote back and forth, and still crack up.

If this dear friend were in hospice care, I would not send her a card.

Show your face: here’s one way to make your own hospice cards

To continue the previous post’s theme of hospice cards, despite our typical focus on ethical wills, here is one idea for how to easily make your own card to give or send someone you love who is in hospice care:

This one is based on the premise that I think being surrounded by photographs of the people I love and the places I love would be heartwarming. If you can’t be there visiting, I might still like to look at you and smile.

(You could even send me a picture you took of my dog that day you reminded me that lake water doesn’t move, like tidal water does!)

So here are two simple versions:

End-of-Life Issues and Hospice Cards

While a main focus of Be Here Then has been ethical wills, it also concerns itself with end of life issues. This includes hospice, that service of helping patients live as fully and as well as they are able when cure is no longer an option, or is no longer sought. When someone is knowingly facing their ending days, it becomes difficult for many of us to know what to say, or to do. Frankly, it scares a lot of us.

We have few, if any, models for how to relate. Regina Holliday has become another patient care advocate, and started a petition to ask Hallmark to start a line of hospice cards. I have signed her petition, and I encourage you to visit her blog and read her story.  But that’s not all —

I confess a wee part of me is a bit dismayed, because one of my plans was to introduce exactly that: a line of “greeting” cards that might be usable for friends in hospice care. Of course, as John Lennon sang, life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans, and the cards idea had to be back-burnered.

But we don’t have to wait for a greeting card company to help make this conversation.  Why don’t we start, ourselves — by imagining what kinds of things we might want to have written in a card to us, as a way to help figure out what to say to someone we love who is now in hospice care.

What follows are a few examples of what I’d love to read from a few of my friends, and one example of what I would write to one of mine.

Status update: why I am not writing my ethical will just yet

This place is where I usually post “how-to” and “how-not-to” write an ethical will or legacy letter.  However, since very recently I have found myself needing to take family matters in hand for those too ailing to handle those matters themselves, keeping up with my planned posts has been nigh impossible.  Instead of writing about end of life issues, I am living them much more personally even than I did when I volunteered  and worked at hospices.

Living these issues is very different from reading about them.  Those of you who have already gone through the experience know that, but those of us who haven’t — yet — can only think we know.

I realize that this is yet another reason for writing an ethical will or letter to the ones we love, and the ones who will come after us that we can love through the letter’s creation:  each experience we have alters us, shifts our perspective even if only ever so slightly, and if we are really lucky, makes us wiser.

Having read those pamphlets and been in those support groups that say “treasure each moment” with your dementing family member, that some of those moments may be the most meaningful you will remember of them — I’d think “yeah, yeah” and flip the page or wait for a new topic to come up.  Well, la la la, they were right.

So, while the planned posts will indeed come, they will come a bit later.  Right now, I’m living the material I will write about.  What about you?

Money, values, & ethical wills

Yes, paying attention to finances and ethical wills go well together.

Some people want their financial legacies to reflect the values through which they have lived their lives but when forced to articulate just what those values are, find themselves speechless.  Writing a draft ethical will is one way to shed light on what those values are, and how you want your hard assets  apportioned after your death.

Why handwriting counts, and neatness doesn’t

Handwriting:  Sometimes illegible, sometimes beautiful, but always important.  When you are creating your ethical will or other format legacy communication, it is part of the gift you are giving.

Why?  For a number of reasons.  In part, probably for a similar reason a friend currently deployed to Afghanistan gave for why getting actual letters

“I’ve got time, I’ll do it later.”

None of us, I’ll wager, thinks to ourself as we go off to the movie theater that we might not come home.  Yet Thursday night in Aurora, Colorado, that is exactly what happened to 12 people.  It happens every day, too, that people go off to work and do not survive the commute.  How many of them, on Thursday, were parents of young children?  How many of us have, on any given day,  some “unfinished business” in our lives we would like a chance to resolve before the unthinkable happens?

Brief review of structure, format, and sharing

There are several things to consider as you prepare to write your ethical will or Legacy Letter (what follows does not very much apply to a memoir).

Let’s consider structure together with format because they are linked.  We’ll get to ‘sharing’ a bit later.  For purposes of example, let us just consider a one- to two-page ethical will.