Learn about a compassionate, community-based approach to caring for someone at the end of life, including the use of medical assistance in dying.
My special guest Anna Byrne is and end-of-life educator, speaker, and author who holds degrees in Gerontology, Psychology, Education, and Theology with a thesis on Medical Assistance in Dying. She is the author of the memoir Seven Year Summer and The Last Caravan: The Power of Community at the End of Life, which we discuss today. She shares her experience supporting a friend through the last months of her life, including using MAID and also planning her funeral and burial. She has also co-founded Community-Supported Dying in the qathet region in British Columbia. Learn more at her website:
This episode includes:
- How Anna first became acquainted with Mary Morgan and eventually ended up supporting her in her dying process
- How Mary approached her dying as an activist just as she had lived her life
- The “dying team” Mary created to help her at the end of her life
- How COVID complicated the plan for Mary’s last days
- The Ring Theory for creating a support network
- How her team used Lotsa Helping Hands to organize tasks and helpers
- The Blessing Way ritual and how the team applied it to Mary’s care
- The “messiness” of community, especially around the end of life
- Anticipatory grief as the date of death approached
- How they helped Mary plan and carry out her funeral and burial
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Lotsa Helping Hands
- Related Episodes:
- Seven Year Summer with Anna Byrne
- A Bioethics Conversation on MAID with Jeffery Kahn PhD
- Conversations About MAID with Diane Rehm
- Compassionate Communities with Elizabeth Johnson, Erin Collins, and Qwynn Galloway-Salazar
- Books:
- 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying by Karen Wyatt MD
- Latest post on Substack: What I Didn’t Understand About Medical Aid in Dying
- What Really Matters Podcast: Grieving the Chosen Goodbye
- Leave me a message by email: kwyattmd@comcast.net, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Support your local bookstore by buying my books on Bookshop and Indiebound: 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying and The Journey from Ego to Soul
- Join the team at Patreon.com/eolu
- Buy me a coffee
- Donate on Paypal
