The deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan and the assisted suicide of young and old that are making the headlines put dying on to the front pages of our minds.
I remember an Army Chaplain who’d served in the Falklands War telling me he’d spent the long sea voyage south preparing his troops mentally and spiritually for the possibility that some might die. And some did.
But what struck me about Jeremy Taylor’s book was the desire that we might die well and happily and that was written in an age when people did die younger and without the palliative care so available to us. By contrast today death at whatever age always seems a tragic event, almost unnatural, as if it were a failure of modern medicine. Yet even in our time we share Taylor’s hope of dying well. It’s that hope on which the whole Hospice movement has been built.
Read it all.
Bishop James Jones of Liverpool: A good death depends on both good medicine and spiritual wellbeing
The deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan and the assisted suicide of young and old that are making the headlines put dying on to the front pages of our minds.
I remember an Army Chaplain who’d served in the Falklands War telling me he’d spent the long sea voyage south preparing his troops mentally and spiritually for the possibility that some might die. And some did.
But what struck me about Jeremy Taylor’s book was the desire that we might die well and happily and that was written in an age when people did die younger and without the palliative care so available to us. By contrast today death at whatever age always seems a tragic event, almost unnatural, as if it were a failure of modern medicine. Yet even in our time we share Taylor’s hope of dying well. It’s that hope on which the whole Hospice movement has been built.
Read it all.