Cudos to 60 Minutes

Stan Goldberg
End of Life
The 60 Minutes segment on end of life expenses did more than highlight inappropriate medical costs. It spoke to the role of medical technology in our...

Faces of Grief

Stan Goldberg
Grieving and Recovery
Although there are many approaches to grief counseling, most focus directly on the grief we experience over the death of a loved one. But what about the unexplainable, and often embarrassing grief experienced over the death of someone we never knew?

The Hard Work of Dying

Stan Goldberg
End of Life
2 Comments
Imagine that you’re preparing for a thirty-day trip to a foreign country and you’re limited to taking only what can be carried in a backpack. Your decisions on what to take or leave behind will determine the quality of your experience. Too many items and the weight will be burdensome. Not enough of the right ones and you might be forced to neglect some basic needs. We make decisions of this type daily. Take what’s important, leave behind what isn’t. But we tend to oblivious to the importance of these decisions for possibly the most momentous journey of our lives—our death.

Bottomless Holes

Stan Goldberg
End of Life
More than 10 years ago, I saw a black and white photograph by Richard Avedon that I still vividly remember. It was taken of a young boy in 1947 in Sicily. He was in the foreground smiling broadly and wearing a suit that was too short in the arms and too tight in the waist. In the background—softly out of focus—was a tree with a symmetrical oval canopy and a fence that defined the boundary between sky and water. A seemingly bucolic scene unless you looked carefully at the boy.

Counseling at the End of Life

Stan Goldberg
End of Life
1 Comment
As the debate on heath care reform heated up, the phrase “end of life counseling” was used as a canard by opponents of change. According to many of them, end of life counseling was the equivalent of a death panel where those worthy of saving would be, and those deemed too expensive to maintain would have the plug pulled. One would have to go back to the McCarthy period to find this level of accusation and inaccuracy. But where was it coming from?