If it wasn't obvious, last night was one of my Broken Sleep nights.
    It wasn't because of grieving, or anything connected to the effect on me of my mother's death. Because yesterday was an unusually physically strenuous day and I haven't had one of those, well, since December 8, 2008, at 0709, after relaxing and eating dinner I decided to pop a significant dose of ibuprofen to ward off any shoulder and back strain I might have provoked shoveling snow and take a nip-it-in-the-bud nap. I awoke a couple of hours before midnight, channel surfed for a bit, read some (I'm trying hard to get through our next book club book, which is entertaining but not particularly interesting), took a short walk in the amazing snow-reflected light of the 3/4 waning moon, wrote the immediately previous post, then, still full of energy and feeling good, decided to figure out if there was another way to access information about the dying experience on the internet.
    I started simple, googling "dying". Bingo! It seems that the search terms I used which led to writing this post was not the most productive phrase. "Dying" led me to "dying process", which yielded much better results. Although not exhaustive, since I'm pretty well satisfied with my results from reading Chapter Fifteen of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I'm listing some links that might be of interest to those of my readers who are approaching, encompassed by or surviving the experience of accompanying someone through dying. The following links are not, by the way, in any particular order:

• The Zen Hospice Project has an interesting page which summarizes much of what the The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying particularizes.
• Although the home page for the website Crossing the Creek is chiefly an advertisement and ordering site for the author's book, he includes two essays from the perspective of an outspoken, highly experienced Hospice RN.
  • The first essay explains why even the most experienced Hospice RNs are sometimes reluctant to talk about their experiences with the dying and what the differences in dying perspective are between those of us who confront the dying rarely throughout our lives and those who specialize in working with the dying.
  • The second essay is a short, sweet statement on behalf of the value of negative emotions, most importantly the fear of death.
• Dear Death (which no longer has an index page so the aforementioned will have to do) is a fascinating site that covers death from a wide variety of angles. It's interesting to click into several pages listed along the left side of each page. The page that introduced me to the site, though, was an acutely clinical review of death, which, curiously, closely follows the Tibetan Buddhist description of death about which I wrote. Check out the site's favicon.
• The author of this essay which appears at Toward the Light is a self-professed medium. This site exists overwhelmingly to support and discuss N[ear]D[eath]E[xperiences]s. However, the essay to which I linked, while containing a description of the author's NDE, also gives some very interesting insight into what it is like to approach death, states of mind that become available to someone who is dying and suggestions for enhancing the environment of the dying one to support these processes. Although written from the point of view of someone who gives plenty of spiritual weight to the process of dying, it also contains intriguing practical insights into the beginning of the journey.
• Dying Man's Daily Journal is written by a man who has been aware that he is dying for some years. I know, sounds absurd, but this journal, I think, is of interest because this man spends each day very aware of being on the other end of life, something most of us rarely do. He almost never mentions death, but it is obvious that, having been labeled as "dying" due to certain physical problems, he cherishes life more acutely than before his prognosis and spends daily time contemplating what life means when lived in the knowledge of ...the valley of the shadow of death...
• Here is yet another page from another Buddhist Hospice Site, this time in New Zealand. It is a fine, sympathetic, highly readable elaboration of the more esoterically technical passages I quoted three posts previously.
• About.com offers a surprisingly varied area regarding the dying process, all of which is available progressively from this page, although I was introduced to the area through this page. This section is a fairly thorough, practical explanation of what one caring for a dying person will confront, what the dying one is experiencing when certain symptoms occur and what palliative care can be rendered, if necessary. At this site I also clicked through to a few pages on grief. I was surprised to learn from this page that the words "grief" and "mourning" harbor distinctively different technical definitions. This page gives a brief but fairly complete overview of the grief process. Much to my amusement, even though the grief pages stress that grief is an individual experience, there is a section entitled "Abnormal Grief". This section, though, doesn't assert that certain types of grief are, for instance, morally wrong, but simply delineates grief experiences that surface for "only 3 to 25 percent of loss survivors". It's an intriguing section to read.
• Finally, I was surprised (although I probably shouldn't have been) to discover that the search phrase I entered led not only to information on the human process of dying but, as well, the process of pets dying. I clicked into a couple because I am good friends with someone who provided compassionate, at home hospice care for his dying cat and, as she has recently been relating in her journal and her twitter account, Dethmama is providing hospice care for her beloved pug, Opal. Truth is, the very few sites I clicked into were nothing compared to the direct experiences to which I have been and am privy, above, and through The Yellow Wallpaper, specifically these one, two, three posts. One site discovered through my search, though, offered a poignant tale of a lesson in grief I thought some of you might enjoy learned from the young companion of a beloved dog euthanized by the vet who wrote the essay.

    Although I'm sure there are many more resources on death, dying and grieving in cyberspace, I don't think I'll be actively searching for them, anymore. I'm satisfied, now, with what I've found and am confident that, if you're looking for cyber information and support, the suggestions and resources in this post and to the right in the Honorable Hospice & Death Blogs will start you on a fruitful search.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 12:42   email  this post