Giving medical professionals some agency in end-of-life decisions can be consistent with church teaching. We just need to integrate the concept of futility.
Canada’s long-standing ban on physician-assisted death is over. Though Canada has a predilection for polite and civil exchange, was the debate heated enough?
Emerging in the welter of advice to the absent-minded is a technique modeled on crowd-sourcing. Call it crowd recall: We can remember if we stick together.
My mother was like a hermit crab who was busy moving out of its shell, and then only the shell was left. “Enjoy it, dear,” she said. She took to staring at the sky.
The importance of loving care for persons near the end of life is fundamental in Catholic teaching. But we've embraced a version of love without that obligation.
Readers offer a remedy for the church's "unction dysfunction," another disturbing aspect of the Supreme Court's lethal-injection ruling, and more on James Agee.
According to Catholic discipline, there is only one kind of person who can offer anointing of the sick: a priest. But there aren’t enough priests to go around.
Dying is an adult activity. This has been one of its bigger surprises for me. I find I need to leave behind the child side of myself to go where I now need to go.
Asleep, she has no idea she is old. // She’s running uphill, no lightfoot, but quite fast /
past the houses and driveways of family friends / toward the higher...
Anne Enright's new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Often the way our society treats "senior citizens" assumes that as bodies age, individuality decreases. But aren't whiskers and white socks a sign of unique wisdom?
Despite hard work, sound planning, lifestyle adjustments, and unusually well-behaved Irish genes, I find myself—to paraphrase Yeats—“where all the ladders” end.
Relatives of Alzheimer's sufferers are often reminded that the human person is more than memory and mind. We don't easily believe this, until something happens.
We moderns pay advanced planning counselors to avoid the fate of St. John of the Cross and to get us to our burial on time, but can we ever be sure it will work out?
