This morning I joined my Dad, who is a part of  Semper Fi #1 - Memorial Honor Detail, at Riverside National Cemetery, for the Unclaimed Veterans Ceremony.   I was honored to accept the flag during the heartfelt and compassionate ceremony.  I was also honored to meet the people who provide the service - to see that these brave men and women are honored and appreciated and that they are no longer alone.

While I know that many of them choose to be alone - having pushed family and friends aside - dealing with the horrors of their service - there may be some who would like to have someone by them as they die - if so, I would be glad to offer my services - to walk them to the door, so to speak - so that they don't need to go it alone. 

I am so proud of my Dad and of the others who offer their time and heart to be sure these Unclaimed Veterans are seen home safely - from the sound of the Rifle's salute and the haunting strains of Taps - to the Dark Isle Piper sending them off with Amazing Grace - it was a beautiful morning and a honor to attend.

Remember these Unsung Heroes

Aid in Dying - a very loaded subject and comes with a lot of stigma attached to it.  What is Medical Aid in Dying?  From Compassion and Choices:

A medical practice that allows a terminally ill, mentally capable adult with a prognosis of six months or less to live to request from their doctor a prescription for medication they can decide to self-ingest to die peacefully in their sleep. 
Medical aid in dying is sometimes incorrectly referred to as “assisted physician suicide,” “physician aid in dying,” “death with dignity,” and “euthanasia.”  Medical aid in dying is not assisted suicide, suicide, or euthanasia. These terms are misleading and factually incorrect. 
I get asked that a lot. Isn't that just suicide?   
No, it isn't. Suicide is a choice between living and dying.  To even qualify for Aid in Dying, you must have a prognosis of six months or less to live.   

Why would anyone choose this?
It gives the control back to the dying person.  Loss of control and an ability to participate in life is a major concern.  When faced with a painful death that perhaps medication cannot alleviate - or most commonly, fatigue.  Dying is hard work and at some point the person is just done.  

I chose to certify and learn all I could about this because I believe it is every persons right to decide if they want this option or not.   Because of the stigma attached to this, I also want to be there so they don't have to worry about doing this on their own.  With and End of Life Doula to help with the details, this allows the family/loved ones to be free to walk the dying person to the door and help them cross it.

For more information you can ask me or visit the website Compassion and Choices.

I attended a very lovely memorial service today and what struck me most about the gentleman they were honoring was how much he did with his life. When I think of someone living a "full life," this was just what he did.  After the eulogy, I just kept thinking about how wonderful a legacy he left to his family and all the people he touched in his life.  

I guess I have been thinking about legacies for awhile now but seeing a life lived fully made me think about how I might be remembered and what I want to share while I am still here.

After the service we sat with a really nice couple and got to talking about the service and the Chaplain who spoke and hospice care and they asked me if I was a nurse. I told them about being an End of Life Doula and the conversation took off.

I actually worried that I was taking over the conversation and kept telling myself to hush a bit LOL  But they did seem really interested and I enjoyed my conversation with them very much.  I have found that people I need to talk to or hear something from just tend to show up when I need them too.  I love that kind of synchronicity.  

I also discovered that I am truly passionate about End of Life Care and all of its facets.  If I can help ease the worry of someone when they need it most, then I will have done my job well.  That isn't such a bad Legacy to leave behind.

I think we all get to certain places in our lives when we start to explore our meaning here on Earth.  Usually, these are the harder times in life but sometimes we don't get to them until the end, when we face our own mortality. 

Exploring meaning, thinking back on what we have done in our journey can often lead us into  creating a Legacy Project.   This is a way of taking all the deep inner work and showcasing it for our loved ones to keep - memorializing who we are and who we were for those who come after us.

These projects can be in many forms like scrapbooks or scrolls, art pieces and memoirs.  Whatever best expresses who you are and how you wish to be remembered.

For me, when my time comes, I thought it would be nice to have pre-cut paper and art supplies out so that when people come to visit, they can create art with me.  Once I have died, these can be collected and put together in a scrapbook or art journal.   

But I also like the idea of a Life Journey Journal.  I found a simple but well done one on Amazon, My Life My Journey created by Kyle Schaetzl.   It divides up the seasons of our life and asks some fun and often deep questions to get us thinking and when done will give others and great idea of who we are and how we lived. 

I think a book like this would be a great gift and also something a dying person and their loved ones could work on together as a type of Legacy Project. 

What we do in life echoes in eternity - how do you wish to be remembered?

I realized I hadn't shared where I got Soar Eternally Free from.  So, story time!

I was trying to think of a name for myself and my EOL business - it seemed all the logical and good names where taken already.  I just sat tossing names out and free associating for over an hour before I hit on Crow - crow - fly - crows soar....

Dumb... D'oh ... Christina *homer simpsons do'h* 

It took me way to long to figure this no brainer out  and it made me laugh.
When my brother died in 1997, we were at the funeral home getting things set up and it came to deciding what to put on the urn for his ashes.  The usual, "RIP," or "forever in our hearts," did not fit my brother at all.   I asked if it could wait for the moment and left it at that.

Moments  after he was cremated we all stepped outside for fresh air and I looked up over the crematory stack and saw several jets pluming as they flew by.  From my angle it looked like they flew right through the smoke and I said something like, "Houston we have lift off," to sort of break the horrible grief and sobbing tears.   We all laughed but the image of Tommy, Soaring Eternally Free stayed with me.

I used it in my memorial speech for him and I also asked the funeral home to put that on his Urn. 

Now I use it whenever I express my condolences to someone who has had a loved one die.  It is also how I see myself during my last breath on Earth. Paused on a high cliff, in the desert at sunset, waiting to Soar.

So that is the story and it is why I am here.  We may not want to talk about our last moments or last breaths but I think it is best to talk, to plan, to be ready ... to soar.

Oh, this book... I knew the outcome - and still, I sobbed at the end. His words just sang - they were poetry and prose and so beautiful. 

I have been reading a lot about the end of life and how the body dies - I am always further studying to be the best death doula I can be.  Books like,  "Body of Work," by Christine Montross and "The Death Class," by Norma Bowe really helped open that topic up.  Death seems to be relegated to the "do not discuss in polite society," arena and that is quite sad.

If one does not look at death... how does one live?

But I had only really been looking at that one side of it, the after the body dies, what happens part. Sam Parnia's AWARE studies totally grabbed my attention - you should look at his work with NDEs. I was fascinated by the whole thing.  But it wasn't until I finished When Breath  Becomes Air that it really hit me - the "how does one live" part - or even why does one live?  

To live a meaningful life.

Paul Kalanithi lived one his entire life - always searching and always learning - and he put all that he learned into his book. He died before he could finish it - his wife did an excellent job in the afterword of giving the book and the life of Paul, closure, but even though he didn't "finish," it, his words and his emotions, told the story perfectly.

What I kept coming back to over and over was what makes a life meaningful?  And how do we live in a meaningful way?  

Some quotes from the book and there are so many good ones - you should read the book:

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” 

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.” 

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.” 

“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

When faced with his coming death - this is what was asked - in how he wanted to live and what his main focus would be in living during his illness - “What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” 
He was a brilliant surgeon, did he want to continue that life as he dealt with his cancer - or was there another path he wanted to try?  And when did he want to stop... at what point would he say this is enough?

And then this:
To his daughter, who was only months old when he died - “That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” 

I guess, for me, I needed to find something to bring meaning, not just to me, but to leave behind as a legacy. We all strive, but for what? To what end? What gives each of us a meaningful life? I think that is why we are here. To use this one life to find meaning and to make the world we share a better place.