One of our patients who died last week had a beautiful passing. During her last hours, her daughter played a video of the patient’s husband who had died a few years earlier. The man was saying over and over how he loved his precious wife. On hearing his voice, our patient roused from her coma,…
Category Archives: Death
Who cares?
I am thinking of a dear patient of ours who lives in a memory care facility here in North Texas. When she came on the Texas Hospice service she could walk but only with assistance. Now she is wheelchair confined and requires someone to feed her three times a day. She is exhibiting the classic…
Do all things really work together, and for good?
There is a elderly couple whose family is talking to us about receiving hospice care. One has dementia and other has significant heart disease. The one with heart disease desires badly to get home so he can resume his life and return to caretaking his wife. Unfortunately, his heart is weakening and he remains hospitalized….
You lay in the bed you make
I am thinking about a particular patient of mine this morning. He is a wonderful guy who would bring quarters to my office hoping to give them to my 6-year-old daughter who sometimes joined me in morning clinic. Despite having a terrible illness for many years, he conducted himself with a wonderful attitude. He was…
A Belated RIP for Jack Kemp
Here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we are vacationing, the landscape is beautiful, the food is wonderful, and altitude is disaffecting our experience. Both boys were sick today (winding roads and hot ski gear). I could hardly catch my breath while trying my hand at snowboarding. And our daughter left ski school early ….
Corporations Revisited
I am planning another trip to Kenya this spring. We plan to work with and encourage the Prison Fellowship Kenya staff. In a region where food is in short supply, these folks are putting up water towers in Kenyan prison farms so there can be year-round crop production. Imagine the Kenyan food shortage problem being…
We Win!
On Saturday morning this past weekend, the weather was cool, but the northern wind made it quite cold. We gathered with about 75 other parents, grand-parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, to watch an 8-year old soccer league championship game. Think of otherwise tame white-collar 40-year-olds hollaring and gesticulating from the sidelines, their happiness hinging on…
Well, I never . . .
Have you ever considered how our daytime to nighttime rituals reflect our lifetimes? Getting up, showering, and drinking coffee resembles our first 15 years. During that part of life, like our mornings, we are are just getting ourselves ready. And then from 15-70 yrs, give or take, we are productive. Just as we are from…
Orthodoxy
I am reading Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” for a second time. What prompted my picking it up again was a felt need for Christian apologetic writing. I had been somewhat shakened in my faith lately, mostly as a result of reading and pondering the thoughts of a couple of atheist writers and speakers. The “no-God” approach has…
Everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten
I love the book, “Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Have you read it? Robert Fulghum wrote it back in the late 80′s. He is profound in his simplicity. Here is a great statement of wisdom, perhaps the deepest every uttered: “Jesus loves me this I know for the bible tells…
