I’m poised to help a media outlet test and promulgate a tool to help its large follower base to share their stories—and honored to be one of thee out of almost 1500 social media feed subscribers to be asked. Yet I remain as troubled as ever by the role of stories (about which I’ve chronicled before in this […]
Hey! If you can’t or don’t wanna rap but would secretly like to to hear your poetic thoughts recorded, I’m now accepting original stanzas for consideration as additional versions of Windrum’s Never Say Die Rap (hear the studio version here). I’ve got the chops, the rap’s got the groove. You have experiences and thoughts. Here are the […]
Diana Rosenkaimer, on the Facebook group IHI Patient Activists, has this to say about end of life autonomy in response to a statement I made in a discussion thread citing the notion of ownership as central to dying in peace: Medicine can try to define it all they want, they are extraneous unless they cause […]
It’s clear that the medical system cannot adequately educate its charges. Patient activists/advocates know that an informed citizenry is required to materially improve medicine. Our participation is all the more requisite around end of life because in order to actualize peaceful dying we must each own our own death, just like women a generation ago […]
En route to making a music video of Windrum’s Never Say Die Rap (which premiered here) I’ve been practicing a lot, recording vocal tracks over the music loop. Here’s a reasonably decent audio version of it. Volume alert: the audio will autoplay at a strong volume, so adjust your audio equipment accordingly. Windrum’s Never Say Die […]
Bite the dust, the big one. Buy the farm. Cash in your chips. Check out. Croak. Cross over. Depart. Expire. Give up the ghost. Good to go. Gone to your reward. Kick the bucket. Meet your maker. Off the mortal coil. Pass on or away. Pushing up daisies. What do these phrases, these substitutes for […]
On Wednesday 24 October 2012 at Denver’s Oriental Theatre I joined 14 other speakers at Ignite Denver 12 in presenting 5 minute talks called “sparks.” These highly structured presentations require 20 slides (of one’s own making) that auto advance every 15 seconds (you can’t control them yourself; no running one slide for 23 seconds and […]
As I work on the materials for the interactive segment of future Windrum’s Dying Terms Matrix presentations, a poem emerged reflecting the many ways we now have to die: Always A petal falls, always, and all ways: A whisper; tangle; sacrament; enmeshment; float; dangle; threadbare; indefinite; a dalliance; gentle into a good night; after discarding […]
Part 1 I’m now a member of Regina Holliday’s Walking Gallery. Regina painted this image for my nifty navy blue patterned thrift store jacket. We didn’t even talk; she’d evidently read and seen enough of me to get to my message’s, and my own, core. I choked up when I first saw this, when Regina […]
A Canadian reader asked me to ruminate on something I refer to in Notes from the Waiting Room’s how to advocate section—that we can’t afford to lose the first week of a terminal hospitalization to confusion—hanging out not believing what is happening and not believing what isn’t happening. Making the world in a week’s time […]
