May 7 – 13, 2017 is National Hospice Palliative Care Week. Mary Schulz, Director of Education at the Alzheimer Society of Canada discusses some of the misconceptions about palliative care and why it’s important to have conversations about end-of-life.
Death is a fact of life. Because the transition from life to death is an unknown, humans are full of fear. And fear drives us to avoidance. Even though there has been increasing media attention to end-of-life issues recently, we seem to live in a death-phobic, death-avoidance culture. While our television, movie and video game screens are often filled with images of violent death. And news reports remind us every day of various threats to life. Can we shift our…