What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

Thanks to Tim B.

By Phoebe Zerwick in the NYT Magazine

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

As he moved to touch his father, Kerr felt a hand on his shoulder. A priest had followed him into the hospital room and was now leading him away, telling him his father was delusional. Kerr’s father died early the next morning. Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada. And the priest, he feels, made a mistake, one that many other caregivers make, of dismissing the moment as a break with reality, as something from which the boy required protection.

It would be more than 40 years before Kerr felt compelled to speak about that evening in the hospital room. He had followed his father, and three generations before him, into medicine and was working at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, where he was the chief medical officer and conducted research on end-of-life visions. It wasn’t until he gave a TEDx Talk in 2015 that he shared the story of his father’s death. Pacing the stage in the sport coat he always wears, he told the audience: “My point here is, I didn’t choose this topic of dying. I feel it has chosen or followed me.” He went on: “When I was present at the bedside of the dying, I was confronted by what I had seen and tried so hard to forget from my childhood. I saw dying patients reaching and calling out to mothers, and to fathers, and to children, many of whom hadn’t been seen for many years. But what was remarkable was so many of them looked at peace.”

The talk received millions of views and thousands of comments, many from nurses grateful that someone in the medical field validated what they have long understood. Others, too, posted personal stories of having witnessed loved ones’ visions in their final days. For them, Kerr’s message was a kind of confirmation of something they instinctively knew — that deathbed visions are real, can provide comfort, even heal past trauma. That they can, in some cases, feel transcendent. That our minds are capable of conjuring images that help us, at the end, make sense of our lives.

Nothing in Kerr’s medical training prepared him for his first shift at Hospice Buffalo one Saturday morning in the spring of 1999. He had earned a degree from the Medical College of Ohio while working on a Ph.D. in neurobiology. After a residency in internal medicine, Kerr started a fellowship in cardiology in Buffalo. To earn extra money to support his wife and two young daughters, he took a part-time job with Hospice Buffalo. Until then, Kerr had worked in the conventional medical system, focused on patients who were often tethered to machines or heavily medicated. If they recounted visions, he had no time to listen. But in the quiet of Hospice, Kerr found himself in the presence of something he hadn’t seen since his father’s death: patients who spoke of people and places visible only to them. “So just like with my father, there’s just this feeling of reverence, of something that wasn’t understood but certainly felt,” he says. (continued)

During one of his shifts, Kerr was checking on a 70-year-old woman named Mary, whose grown children had gathered in her room, drinking wine to lighten the mood. Without warning, Kerr remembers, Mary sat up in her bed and crossed her arms at her chest. “Danny,” she cooed, kissing and cuddling a baby only she could see. At first, her children were confused. There was no Danny in the family, no baby in their mother’s arms. But they could sense that whatever their mother was experiencing brought her a sense of calm. Kerr later learned that long before her four children were born, Mary lost a baby in childbirth. She never spoke of it with her children, but now she was, through a vision, seemingly addressing that loss.

In observing Mary’s final days at Hospice, Kerr found his calling. “I was disillusioned by the assembly-line nature of medicine,” Kerr told me. “This felt like a more humane and dignified model of care.” He quit cardiology to work full time at the bedsides of dying patients. Many of them described visions that drew from their lives and seemed to hold meaning, unlike hallucinations resulting from medication, or delusional, incoherent thinking, which can also occur at the end of life. But Kerr couldn’t persuade other doctors, even young residents making the rounds with him at Hospice, of their value. They wanted scientific proof.

At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010, a research fellow, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a family member who, before his death, experienced visions — a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his brothers.

The study wasn’t designed to answer how these visions differ neurologically from hallucinations or delusions. Rather, Kerr saw his role as chronicler of his patients’ experiences. Borrowing from social-science research methods, Kerr, Banas and their colleagues based their study on daily interviews with patients in the 22-bed inpatient unit at the Hospice campus in the hope of capturing the frequency and varied subject matter of their visions. Patients were screened to ensure that they were lucid and not in a confused or delirious state. The research, published in 2014 in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, found that visions are far more common and frequent than other researchers had found, with an astonishing 88 percent of patients reporting at least one vision. (Later studies in Japan, India, Sweden and Australia confirm that visions are common. The percentages range from about 20 to 80 percent, though a majority of these studies rely on interviews with caregivers and not patients.)

In the last 10 years, Kerr has hired a permanent research team who expanded the studies to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening the researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions. They can occur while patients are asleep or fully conscious. Dead family members figure most prominently, and by contrast, visions involving religious themes are exceedingly rare. Patients often relive seminal moments from their lives, including joyful experiences of falling in love and painful ones of rejection. Some dream of the unresolved tasks of daily life, like paying bills or raising children. Visions also entail past or imagined journeys — whether long car trips or short walks to school. Regardless of the subject matter, the visions, patients say, feel real and entirely unique compared with anything else they’ve ever experienced. They can begin days, even weeks, before death. Most significant, as people near the end of their lives, the frequency of visions increases, further centering on deceased people or pets. It is these final visions that provide patients, and their loved ones, with profound meaning and solace.

Kerr’s latest research is focused on the emotional transformation he has often observed in patients who experience such visions. The first in this series of studies, published in 2019, measured psychological and spiritual growth among two groups of hospice patients: those who had visions and a control group of those who did not. Patients rated their agreement with statements including, “I changed my priorities about what is important in life,” or “I have a better understanding of spiritual matters.” Those who experienced end-of-life visions agreed more strongly with those statements, suggesting that the visions sparked inner change even at the end of life. “It’s the most remarkable of our studies,” Kerr told me. “It highlights the paradox of dying, that while there is physical deterioration, they are growing and finding meaning. It highlights what patients are telling us, that they are being put back together.”

A photo illustration of two silhouettes: one person and one dog.
Credit…Photo illustration by Amy Friend

In the many conversations Kerr and I have had over the past year, the contradiction between medicine’s demand for evidence and the ineffable quality of his patients’ experiences came up repeatedly. He was first struck by this tension about a year before the publication of his first study, during a visit with a World War II veteran named John who was tormented throughout his life by nightmares that took him back to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. John had been part of a rescue mission to bring wounded soldiers to England by ship and leave those too far gone to die. The nightmares continued through his dying days, until he dreamed of being discharged from the Army. In a second dream, a fallen soldier appeared to John to tell him that his comrades would soon come to “get” him. The nightmares ended after that.

Kerr has been nagged ever since by the inadequacy of science, and of language, to fully capture the mysteries of the mind. “We were so caught up in trying to quantify and give structure to something so deeply spiritual, and really, we were just bystanders, witnesses to this,” he says. “It feels a little small to be filling in forms when you’re looking at a 90-something-year-old veteran who is back in time 70 years having an experience you can’t even understand.” When Kerr talks about his research at conferences, nurses tend to nod their heads in approval; doctors roll their eyes in disbelief. He finds that skeptics often understand the research best when they watch taped interviews with patients.

What’s striking about this footage, which dates back to Kerr’s early work in 2008, is not so much the content of the visions but rather the patients’ demeanor. “There’s an absence of fear,” Kerr says. A teenage girl’s face lights up as she describes a dream in which she and her deceased aunt were in a castle playing with Barbie dolls. A man dying of cancer talks about his wife, who died several years earlier and who comes to him in his dreams, always in blue. She waves. She smiles. That’s it. But in the moment, he seems to be transported to another time or place.

Kerr has often observed that in the very end, dying people lose interest in the activities that preoccupied them in life and turn toward those they love. As to why, Kerr can only speculate. In his 2020 book, “Death Is but a Dream,” he concludes that the love his patients find in dying often brings them to a place that some call enlightenment and others call God. “Time seems to vanish,” he told me. “The people who loved you well, secured you and contributed to who you are are still accessible at a spiritual and psychological level.”

That was the case with Connor O’Neil, who died at the age of 10 in 2022 and whose parents Kerr and I visited in their home. They told us that just two days before his death, their son called out the name of a family friend who, without the boy’s knowledge, had just died. “Do you know where you are?” Connor’s mother asked. “Heaven,” the boy replied. Connor had barely spoken in days or moved without help, but in that moment, he sat up under his own strength and threw his arms around her neck. “Mommy, I love you,” he said.

Kerr’s research finds that such moments, which transcend the often-painful physical decline in the last days of life, help parents like the O’Neils and other relatives grieve even unfathomable loss. “I don’t know where I would be without that closure, or that gift that was given to us,” Connor’s father told us. “It’s hard enough with it.” As Kerr explains, “It’s the difference between being wounded and soothed.”

In June, I visited the adult daughter of a patient who died at home just days earlier. We sat in her mother’s living room, looking out on the patio and bird feeders that had given the mother so much joy. Three days before her mother’s death, the daughter was straightening up the room when her mother began to speak more lucidly than she had in days. The daughter crawled into her mother’s bed, held her hand and listened. Her mother first spoke to the daughter’s father, whom she could see in the far corner of the room, handsome as ever. She then started speaking with her second husband, visible only to her, yet real enough for the daughter to ask whether he was smoking his pipe. “Can’t you smell it?” her mother replied. Even in the retelling, the moment felt sacred. “I will never, ever forget it,” the daughter told me. “It was so beautiful.”

I also met one of Banas’s patients, Peggy Haloski, who had enrolled in hospice for home care services just days earlier, after doctors at the cancer hospital in Buffalo found blood clots throughout her body, a sign that the yearlong treatment had stopped working. It was time for her husband, Stephen, to keep her comfortable at home, with their two greyhounds.

Stephen led Banas and me to the family room, where Peggy lay on the couch. Banas knelt on the floor, checked her patient’s catheter, reduced her prescriptions so there were fewer pills for her to swallow every day and ordered a numbing cream for pain in her tailbone. She also asked about her visions.

The nurse on call that weekend witnessed Peggy speaking with her dead mother.

“She was standing over here,” Peggy told Banas, gesturing toward the corner of the room.

“Was that the only time you saw her?” Banas asked.

“So far.”

“Do you think you’ll be seeing her more?”

“I will. I will, considering what’s going on.”

Peggy sank deeper into the couch and closed her eyes, recounting another visit from the dead, this time by the first greyhound she and Stephen adopted. “I’m at peace with everybody. I’m happy,” she said. “It’s not time yet. I know it’s not time, but it’s coming.”

When my mother, Chloe Zerwick, was dying in 2018, I had never heard of end-of-life visions. I was acting on intuition when her caregivers started telling me about what we were then calling hallucinations. Mom was 95 and living in her Hudson Valley home under hospice care, with lung disease and congestive heart failure, barely able to leave her bed. The hospice doctor prescribed an opioid for pain and put her on antipsychotic and anti-anxiety medicines to tame the so-called hallucinations he worried were preventing her from sleeping. It is possible that some of these medications caused Mom’s visions, but as Kerr has explained, drug-induced hallucinations do not rule out naturally occurring visions. They can coexist.

In my mother’s case, I inherently understood that her imaginary life was something to honor. I knew what medicine-induced hallucinations looked and felt like. About 10 years before her death, Mom fell and injured her spine. Doctors in the local hospital put her on an opioid to control the pain, which left her acting like a different person. There were spiders crawling on the hospital wall, she said. She mistook her roommate’s bed for a train platform. Worse, she denied that I loved her or ever did. Once we took her off the medicine, the hallucinations vanished.

The visions she was having at the end of her life were entirely different; they were connected to the long life she had led and brought a deep sense of comfort and delight. “You know, for the first time in my life I have no worries,” she told me. I remember feeling a weight lift. After more than a decade of failing health, she seemed to have found a sense of peace.

The day before her death, as her breathing became more labored, Mom made an announcement: “I have a new leader,” she said.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Mark. He’s going to take me to the other side.”

She was speaking of my husband, alive and well back home in North Carolina.

“That’s great, Mom, except that I need him here with me,” I replied. “Do you think he can do both?”

“Oh, yes. He’s very capable.”

That evening, Mom was struggling again to breathe. “I’m thinking of the next world,” she said, and of my husband, who would lead her there. The caregiver on duty for the night and I sat at her bedside as Mom’s oxygen level fell from 68 to 63 to 52 and kept dropping until she died the next morning. My mother was not a brave person in the traditional sense of the word. She was afraid of snakes, the subway platform and any hint of pain. But she faced her death, confident that a man who loves her daughter would guide her to whatever lay ahead.

“Do you think it will happen to you?” she asked me at one point about her dreaming life.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” I replied, not knowing, as I do now, that these experiences are part of what may await us all.


Phoebe Zerwick, the author of “Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt,” is a North Carolina-based journalist. She teaches journalism and writing at Wake Forest University, where she directs the journalism program. Amy Friend is an artist in Canada whose work focuses on history, time, land-memory, dust, oceans and our connection to the universe.

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Does it bug you?

Thanks to Sue P.

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Sisyphus redux

Thanks to Mike C.

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The CDC Changes Its COVID Policy

Thanks to Ed M.

The CDC press release stated that those with COVID can return to normal activities if symptoms are improving and fever, if present, has been gone for at least 24 hours. To make sense of this recommendation, we need to understand that COVID occurs in two stages. In the first stage, the virus is dominant. In the second stage, the immune system takes over.

The Virus Stage: SARS-CoV-2 virus enters the body in tiny droplets that spread from the nose and mouth by someone who is infected. The virus then attaches to and enters cells that line the nose, throat, windpipe, breathing tubes (bronchi), and, in the most severe cases, lungs. After the virus enters cells, it begins to reproduce itself. Whereas one virus particle might enter a cell, about 100 leave the cell before killing it. Hundreds of viruses become thousands of viruses that become millions of viruses. At this point, most people don’t have any symptoms. But they are highly contagious. So, when people recently infected talk, laugh, sneeze, or sing, virus-containing droplets can be shared. As is true for many infectious diseases, people are most contagious a day or two before symptoms begin, when virus reproduction is at its peak.

The Immune Response Stage: After a few days, the body’s immune system begins to respond. B cells make antibodies and helper T cells assist. Cytotoxic T cells kill virus infected cells. The war is on. Although it might seem surprising, symptoms don’t become obvious until the immune system kicks in, because it’s the immune system—not the virus alone—that causes them. Once the immune system begins to fight back, viral reproduction becomes a smaller part of the disease process.

It would make sense that as symptoms improve—or, said another way, that the immune system abates—that people who are infected will be far less likely to shed virus and infect others. The CDC, as an extra measure of caution, argued that people with resolving symptoms could still reasonably wear a mask for an additional five days when in public. 

Here’s another way of approaching this. If you have symptoms of a respiratory viral infection and are in a high-risk group, test for COVID. If you have COVID, take an antiviral medicine early in the illness. If you aren’t in a high-risk group, don’t test for COVID. Just assume that you have COVID or one of the other respiratory viruses that routinely cause thousands of people to be hospitalized and die every year. Both groups should stay home until symptoms improve. If you can’t stay home, where a mask in public until your symptoms improve.

During the pandemic, many people felt that if they had respiratory symptoms but tested negative for COVID, they could go about their daily activities as before, comfortable that they weren’t spreading a harmful virus. This didn’t make any sense. Other winter respiratory viruses are also deadly, especially for the very young, very old, or people with chronic diseases or weakened immune systems. For example, every year in the United States:

· Influenza causes 140,000 to 800,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 to 60,000 deaths—100-200 of those deaths occur in children.

· Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes about 150,000 hospitalizations in children and 100 to 300 deaths. In the elderly, RSV causes between 60,000 to 120,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 to 14,000 deaths.

· Parainfluenza virus causes about 50,000 hospitalizations in children.  

In other words, you don’t have to have COVID to be sick or to die or to transmit a virus that could harm or kill others. This approach, which is more respectful of others, would mean a dramatic change from what we have been doing. But it makes more sense than treating COVID differently from these other infections

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Sad story correlating Trump supporters’ increased COVID death rates

Thanks to Mike C.

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This Bird Is Half Male, Half Female, and Completely Stunning

A green honeycreeper spotted on a farm in Colombia exhibits a rare biological phenomenon known as bilateral gynandromorphism.

This honeycreeper was first observed in October 2021 on a small farm in Villamaría, in western Colombia, and soon became a regular visitor. It appeared to be a bilateral gynandromorph: female on one side and male on the other.CreditCredit…John Murillo

Thanks to Ed M.

By Emily Anthes in the NYT

Colombia is a bird watcher’s paradise. Its stunningly diverse ecosystems — which include mountain ranges, mangrove swamps, Caribbean beaches and Amazonian rainforests — are home to more avian species than any other country on Earth.

So when Hamish Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, booked a bird-watching vacation in Colombia, he was hoping to spot some interesting and unusual creatures.

He got more than he bargained for. During one outing, in early January 2023, the proprietor of a local farm drew his attention to a green honeycreeper, a small songbird that is common in forests ranging from southern Mexico to Brazil. (Continued)

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Johns Hopkins chief diversity officer steps down months after calling men, white people ‘privileged’

Thanks to Ed M.

Ed note: Are white, heterosexual Christian men privileged? IMHO, being one, I’d say “yes” at least in some arenas both current and historical. But, I certainly didn’t feel that way in Saudi Arabia where I was a “kafir”–non-believer and my whiteness was irrelevant or negative. It’s complex, far from being the simplistic statement at Hopkins.

Click here to read the article.

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Advance Directive for Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking (VSED Directive)

Some progressive illnesses, like dementia, make you lose your ability to make decisions about your health care, including choosing medical aid in dying. VSED does not require a specific diagnosis or physician order, so it might be the only option for some people wishing to accelerate the process of dying.

This directive supplements and does not replace your current directive. Talking to your loved ones and legal surrogate is a most important step in assuring your wishes are met.

You can find this directive by clicking here.

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A wish many have

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Ah, it’s that time again

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Using a preposition to end a sentence is something up with which we should not put!

The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly by John McWhorter in the NYT

Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Hats off to them, sincerely. But it is hard to convey how bizarre, to an almost comical degree, such a decree seems in terms of how language actually works. It is rather like announcing that it is now permissible for cats to meow.

There has long been a tacit idea that the pox on ending sentences with a preposition is based on some kind of principle — maybe linguistic or maybe aesthetic. Actually, it is based on essentially nothing. Like phlogistonspontaneous generation and gnomes, the preposition rule started with an idea that felt right in another time but has no logical standing today.

The first person on record to declare opposition to ending sentences with a preposition was the poet John Dryden in the 17th century. But what really set the idea in stone was Bishop Robert Lowth’s highly influential “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” in 1762 and its direct descendant, Lindley Murray’s “English Grammar” in 1795. The two manuscripts had the same sort of influence in the 18th and 19th centuries as Strunk & White would have later. (continued)

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Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation”

Ed note: This poem was sent to me by a writer who is loosing her vision in one eye due to a malignant melanoma (successfully treated with proton beam radiation therapy). It raises the question–can we find new strengths in the losses of illness and aging?

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language

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Ah, those you’re cheering for

Thanks to Bob P.

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It creeps up on you

Ed note – Recommend reading for lots of laughs: The one-hundred year old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

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Death with Dignity Act in Washington – 15 Years Later

Ed note: Here’s an email notice sent out by co-Executive Directors of End of Life Washington

Today, March 5th, 2024, marks 15 years since Medical Aid in Dying became available in Washington State. Initiative 1000, otherwise known as The Washington Death with Dignity Act, passed on November 4, 2008, and went into effect that following spring. This is a day to celebrate – the first day Washingtonians were able to exercise their right to use Medical Aid in Dying, and a landmark day for bodily autonomy in Washington State. 

Earlier this year, we were going through old archives with two founding and foundational members of this organization, Midge Levy and Arline Hinckley. Sifting through old newsletters, we found a piece by Robb Miller, the executive director of End of Life Washington at the time, titled “How We Won I-1000″. The piece, included below, outlines Robb’s perspective on why I-1000 was so successful at the polls. As we enter 2024, we want to reflect on what’s changed during these last 15 years of access to Medical Aid in Dying in Washington and set our sights on what’s to come.   

The population of Washington has changed. Our population has grown at twice the rate of the rest of the United States, with over 1.3 million more people residing here than in 2009. Of those new residents, the fastest growing group has been people 65 and older, growing over 62 percent in the last 15 years. As our population grows, I am grateful to be living in a state with some of the best end-of-life care and support in the nation.  

Using this law, even with 15 years of progress behind us, remains difficult. People go to great lengths to access these medications and they often receive significant support to do so. For comparison, in 2009, the aid-in-dying medications were dispensed to 63 individuals, compared to 2022 where 452 received medications. Each year we see more requests for support, and we hear the same from our healthcare partners; more people want access and need support accessing this law.   


Last year, we updated the Death with Dignity Act, to include more qualified medical providers, improve medication delivery, and shorten the waiting period. The changes are not yet a year old, and we are seeing improved access and opportunities. The waiting period from a person’s initial request to them receiving a prescription has been shortened from 15 days to 7; Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioners (ARNPs and Physician Assistants (PAs) are now allowed to participate as prescribing or consulting providers on a person’s request to use medical aid-in-dying; providers are allowed to file their required paperwork electronically instead of by mail; and a person’s life-ending medication can now be picked up by a trusted person instead of the dying patient needing to receive their medication directly from the pharmacist. All these changes have helped people across the state find peace in times of great suffering, while preserving the strong safeguards in the law that prevent abuse.  

As access has been improved, barriers to access continue to grow. Since 2009 we have seen a steady increase in hospitals merging with restrictive institutions. These restrictive systems limit access to end-of-life services, and the mergers mean that more providers across the state are barred by their employers from supporting their patients in accessing their full end-of-life rights. Since the law was passed 15 years ago there have been big healthcare mergers between Swedish and Providence (2012) and CHI Franciscan and Virginia Mason (2022). As a result of these mergers, more than 50% of the hospital beds in Washington State are provided by restrictive systems and patients in those beds are not able to access this care without substantial effort and external support.  


What remains unchanged is the support and dedication of excellent social workers, physicians, volunteers, nurses, hospice staff, and clergy. People across the state, then and now, are working to improve end-of-life care. We have deep reverence for the helpers who make access to this law possible – thank you. 


As we reflect and look ahead this year, there is so much to celebrate. Thank you for being part of this community and for your commitment to end of life options. The right to choose at the end of life has come so far in this state, and yet it feels like we need your commitment to autonomy and care more now than ever. This work isn’t easy; every step forward takes all our effort and collaboration. This truly cannot happen without you. We are so glad you’re here with us and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve together over the next 15 years.

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Gene Kelley and Sugar Ray Robinson Tap Dancing

Thanks to Mary Jane F.

Tap originated in the United States through the fusion of several ethnic percussive dances, primarily West African sacred and secular step dances (gioube) and Scottish, Irish, and English clog dances, hornpipes, and jigs

To enjoy this amazing duo, CLICK HERE! (If needed unmute the sound on the clip)

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The revamped Mariners offense’s biggest focus? Cut down on all the strikeouts

By Tyler Kepner in the Athletic


PEORIA, Ariz. — The matchup of slogan versus nuanced explanation is never a fair fight. The slogan always wins. So if the Seattle Mariners need buzzwords to energize their loyal but letdown fans, they could use these:

“This is our time,” Jerry Dipoto, the president of baseball operations, said in his Arizona office Thursday. “We have players just entering what should be the best seasons of their careers. And we think now our window is open and this is the group that can lead us there.”

Maybe it’s not quite Kurt Russell, as Herb Brooks in “Miracle,” challenging his young hockey team before the big game against the Soviets: “This is your time – now go out there and take it!” But it’s the best Dipoto can do to share the optimism and urgency that really do exist around the only franchise to never reach the World Series.

The Mariners look good — no, really, it’s true. Their starters are dynamic, durable, prime-age strike throwers. Their balanced, revamped lineup should sustain more rallies and score more runs. And if the members of the American League West keep taking turns as champions — the Houston Astros in 2022, the Texas Rangers in 2023 — this just might be Seattle’s time.

And yet, there’s lingering skepticism about the intentions and motivations of the front office, and Dipoto knows it’s his fault. Last Oct. 3 — two days after the Mariners’ only game in the last three seasons with no hope of making the playoffs — Dipoto refused to promise that his team would win a title.

The goal, he tried to explain, was to win at least 54 percent of the time over the course of a decade. The team, he added, was actually doing the fans a favor by asking for patience instead of pushing all in for a quick fix.

My, oh my.

Teoscar Hernández (left) and Eugenio Suárez combined for 48 home runs in 2023, along with 425 strikeouts. (Joe Nicholson / USA Today)

“I spoke in words that made sense to me — and clearly, I confused people,” Dipoto said on Thursday. “Our goal is not to be mediocre. Our goal is not to go out and win just enough to get over the line. There was more that was expressed in that thought that didn’t fit into a tweet. And unfortunately, the tweet version is the version that was conveyed, and that’s my mistake. I was talking long-form in a short-form world.”

Dipoto continued, and in the spirit of context, here’s what he said: (continued)

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Why High Blood Pressure Matters to Your Health

By Liz Szabo in the NYT

Nearly half of American adults have high blood pressure — but only a quarter of those with hypertension have it under control, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

High blood pressure “is a smoldering public health crisis,” said Dr. Rishi K. Wadhera, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an author of new research showing that blood pressure screenings have not returned to what they were before the coronavirus pandemic.

High blood pressure can raise the risk of heart attack, strokepregnancy complications and other health problems, but the symptoms are “often silent,” Dr. Wadhera said.

“I worry it flies under the radar for many patients,” he added.

Here’s what to know about the issue, and how to get your blood pressure under control.

Blood pressure is the force that blood exerts against artery walls in the heart, said Dr. Jim Liu, a cardiologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. You’ll always hear your blood pressure given as two numbers: The top number, known as systolic pressure, measures that force when the heart contracts. The bottom number, known as diastolic pressure, gauges the force when the heart muscle relaxes. It’s measured in units known as millimeters of mercury, or mm Hg.

You can have your blood pressure checked during a medical appointment or at a pharmacy, or you can check it yourself with a home monitor. The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology define normal blood pressure as below 120/80 mm Hg. The C.D.C. defines high blood pressure as 130/80 mm Hg or higher.

Very high blood pressure can cause symptoms including severe headaches, chest pain and dizziness. For many people, however, blood pressure increases too gradually for them to notice these issues, Dr. Liu said.

High blood pressure forces the heart to work harder to pump blood. Over time, the overwhelmed heart can slowly start to falter and struggle to pump blood out to the rest of the body, a condition called heart failure.

The force and friction of high blood pressure can also injure the delicate lining of the arteries, Dr. Liu said. Tears in the artery wall allow LDL cholesterol — also known as the “bad” cholesterol — to latch on and form clumps, or plaques, in these gaps. This can block blood flow and, in some patients, cause a heart attack.

Blockages in arteries that carry blood to the brain can lead to a stroke. Long-term damage to blood vessels in the brain can also lead to a condition called vascular dementia, Dr. Liu said.

All arteries stiffen over time, leading blood pressure to climb steadily as people age. By age 75, an estimated 80 percent of men and 86 percent of women in the United States have high blood pressure.

Multiple risk factors have been linked to high blood pressure, including smokingheavy drinkingobesity and chronic stress. A lack of exercise and diets high in sodium and processed foods have also been associated with an increased risk of hypertension.

For some people, lifestyle changes can be as powerful as medication, said Dr. Martha Gulati, the director of preventive cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. She recommends at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day and sleeping seven to nine hours a night, both of which are associated with lower blood pressure. Maintaining or achieving a healthy body weight can also reduce blood pressure, Dr. Gulati said.

Avoiding products that contain nicotine is important. Using nicotine drives up blood pressure, narrows blood vessels and may contribute to the hardening of arteries, according to the American Heart Association.

Some research suggests that following a low-sodium diet could reduce blood pressure by two to eight mm Hg for some patients, and that adopting the DASH diet — which emphasizes fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products — could reduce blood pressure by eight to 14 points. Abstaining from alcohol or limiting consumption to no more than one glass per day for women and two glasses for men could reduce blood pressure by two to four points.

People who can’t lower their blood pressure to normal levels through lifestyle changes will need medication, Dr. Gulati said. Water pills, or diuretics, help remove sodium and water from the body, bringing down blood pressure. Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) both relax blood vessels, though they work in different ways. Calcium channel blockers help relax the muscle cells of blood vessels, and some slow your heart rate. People who can’t lower their blood pressure with these drugs may need additional medications. Doctors take a patient’s age, health and risk factors into consideration before deciding what medication to prescribe.

“Blood pressure is the most modifiable risk factor for heart disease and stroke,” Dr. Gulati said. “With lifestyle changes and medications, our patients can take control of it — and their heart health.”

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Your next test will be ….

Thanks to MaryLou P.

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When will it come?

Thanks to Mary M.

“The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.  The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
– Henry Van Dyke, Fisherman’s Luck
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C.D.C. Shortens Isolation Period for People With Covid

Thanks to Ed M.

By Apoorva Mandavilli in the NYT

Americans with Covid or other respiratory infections need not isolate for five days before returning to work or school, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday, a striking sign of changing attitudes toward the coronavirus.

People with respiratory illnesses may resume daily activities if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medications and if their symptoms are improving, agency officials said.

Acknowledging that people can be contagious even without symptoms, the C.D.C. urged those who end isolation to limit close contact with others, wear well-fitted masks, improve indoor air quality and practice good hygiene, like washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes, for five days.

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Sign of the week

Thanks to Bob P. Click here for more.

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Have you now or have you ever ….?

Thanks to Pam P.

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Memory Hub Newsletter

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Does your heart go Hamma Hamma?

Ed note: Have fun with our Washington place names! Make sure to read this aloud.

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