Welcome to the community of the bereaved, the searching, and those seeking peace around death and the losses of beloved friends, animals, and family members. Please send items of interest for sharing in our next newsletter to nekdeathcarecommunity@gmail.com.

It seems like everything sleeps in winter, but it’s really a time of renewal and reflection.
— Elizabeth Camden

Death Cafe Notes

A new Death Cafe is starting in Hardwick! The first one will be Monday, December 9th at 1:00, at 101 S. Main St., 3rd floor.
At the November Death Cafe in Albany, there was lively conversation about The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, a TV series lots of people are enjoying.
We have heard of interest in starting new Death Cafes in Brownington and Newport. If you're interested please let us know.

What did we learn at the Albany Roundtable?

On November 21st, twelve community members squeezed around the table at the Albany library to share ideas and perspectives on how we might fulfill our mission to Encourage compassionate conversations about loss, grief and dying. For most of us, these are not easy conversations to start or to hold!

The questions that seemed of most interest:

What can we learn to do for each other in a community, that professionals can’t do for us?
What is Emotional CPR?
What organizations would benefit from the connections we make at the grassroots level?
How can we organize ourselves to make a difference by encouraging these conversations?

What is Emotional CPR (eCPR)?

It's a public health education program which prepares members of the public to assist a person who is experiencing emotional distress. Just as a person’s physical heart needs attention in a cardiac crisis, a person’s emotional heart needs attention in an emotional crisis. eCPR is a form of heart-to-heart connection for emotional resuscitation that can be learned and practiced by any member of the community.

It can be challenging to offer support to someone who is struggling or in deep pain. Many times our first response is to offer advice to help shift the person away from their pain. We do this, not necessarily for the other person, but as a way to alleviate our discomfort from the pain they are expressing. But offering advice, rather than being present with the person, oftentimes misses the mark for both people.

Our Death Care Community could develop a Support Network of people practiced in Emotional CPR and willing to be present and available to others who are distressed because of grief, loss, death or dying. Would you consider doing some training and practice to be part of such a network? Although several of us are nurses, end of life doulas, chaplains, social workers or doctors, in this capacity we would be serving others in a limited capacity as volunteer community members.

Let us know if this interests you, and we'll look into creating an appropriate training & practice program for our area.

Recommendations to READ, LISTEN, & WATCH

Read Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind, by Barbara Becker

Becker inspires readers to live with the end in mind and proves that turning toward loss rather than away from it is the only true way to live life to its fullest. With life-affirming prose, Becker helps us see that that grief is not a problem to be solved, but rather a sacred invitation--an opportunity to let go into something even greater...a love that will inform all the days of our lives.

Read The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller

The Wild Edge of Sorrow offers hope and healing for a profoundly fractured world--and a pathway home to the brightness, pains, and gifts of being alive. Introducing the 5 gates of grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller explores how we move through the waters of grief and loss in a culture so fundamentally detached from the needs of the soul.

Watch Architecture of Death: The Inner World of Dying, streaming until December 11th, with the Live Q&A being held via Zoom on December 7th, at 6pm EST.

This third and final film in the When You Die trilogy explores the physical aspect of dying, as well as the unseen felt experiences that can occur, such as: the changing roles within a family, the potential to heal old wounds, deathbed visions or dreams, messages to loved ones from the dying or recently passed, and a host of other phenomena.

Watch for a new film, The Room Next Door, premiering December 20th.

Five Wishes for the Holiday Season

Has this ever happened to you? You’re at a holiday gathering of family or friends. Everyone is seated at the table; children and dogs may be milling around the room. At an opening in the conversation, you bring up something that’s been on your mind lately - what you want to happen when you die, or when you’re dying. The others at the table seem to freeze. Why do you want to bring us all down by talking about dying? they say.

Five Wishes is a wonderful tool for backing up our desires to let family and friends know what we want. It is friendlier, easier to complete, and more inclusive of our spiritual and emotional concerns about end of life, than the longer legal forms for creating Advance Directives. Most importantly, once it is filled out and signed, it becomes a valid “living will” under Vermont law!

Time is a blanket.

Time itself doesn't heal wounds.That takes a higher order of thought. But almost without effort, time gentles the present and helps us move on.

-by John Yemma, Editor, The Christian Science Monitor Weekly, March 11, 2013

(shared by Mariel Hess)

Revisit our NEK Death Care Community website and the amazing Resources section still growing there thanks to Lindsey Warren! You can send Lindsey an email directly to let her know what you love about our Resources section, or what you'd like to see added. The Resources are organized into nine categories:

Planning
Care Organizations
Support for the Journey
Read, Watch, Listen
After Death Care
Grief, Loss, and Mourning
Alzheimers and Dementia
Suicide
Animals

We also have Northeast Kingdom Death Care Community bookmarks to distribute. The bookmarks are printed with our website and email information. If you would like some for your library, business or practice, let us know!

Winter newsletter

Fall newsletter