Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Vacation soon, then activity

I'm finally putting some things to rest, as I prepare to start some new activities including, I so fervently hope, my plans for developing an end of life care team at work.

I had a couple more discussions with the nurse manager of our unit this past week, and it seems like I'm finally going to soon get the formal go-ahead for the project I first proposed in January, and for which I started preparing last October.

Maybe I've been preparing for this project since I first attended an end of life care program in...2003, maybe. That was a day-long event at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, now known as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. BI is home to one of the best medical writers around, as well as to a blogging CEO.

Then again, maybe I've been preparing for this project since 1976. That was the year I graduated from a hospital-run school of nursing, and that my father died.

I'll ramp up the frequency of my posting here, and plan to include accounts of the project as well as others related to, or provoked by, the topics of living, dying, death, and the things that precede and follow them.

I've been working on a piece, mostly in my head, about the sudden loss of a colleague last month. I hope to get it down in pixels, in a form that's worthy of the subject, while I'm recharging next week.

Meanwhile, I came across this site while scoping out something entirely unrelated to where I ended up. Ain't that always the way?
Today is the first day after we buried Pablo's physical body in the ground at Forest Lawn. He is now fully and completely at rest. Now we will begin our journey of looking for Pablo's spirit and energy in our lives, in each other, in the world. It's not hard. He cast a wide net, my little Scrapper.

I want to write about the past two days, and I will. But today it's too hard. I can't touch it yet. It's too hot.