Planning for your medical care and end-of-life care: 

The Conversation Project  

Talking with your loved ones openly and honestly, before a medical crisis happens, gives everyone a shared understanding about what matters most to you at the end of life. The Conversation Project is dedicated to helping people talk about their wishes for end-of-life care. They developed the original Conversation Starter Kit as a useful tool to help people have conversations with their family members or other loved ones about their wishes regarding end-of-life care. 

The Five Wishes

The “Five Wishes" document meets the legal requirements for an advance directive in Colorado.  You can use Five Wishes in Colorado to express how you want to be treated if you are seriously ill and unable to speak for yourself, using a document that is easy to understand. All you need to do is check a box, circle a direction, or write a few sentences.  Once it is signed and witnessed, your Five Wishes is a legal document.  This document should be available for free from your hospital or cancer resource center, or you can purchase a copy online.

The Go Wish Game

Go Wish gives you an easy, even entertaining way to talk about what is most important to you. The cards help you find words to talk about what is important if you were to be living a life that may be shortened by serious illness.  Playing the game with your relatives or best friends can help you learn how you can best comfort your loved ones when they need you most. 

A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death

This book by Palliative Care Physician B.J. Miller and journalist and caregiver Shoshana Bergerand is a clear-eyed and big-hearted action plan for approaching the end of life, written to help readers feel more in control of an experience that so often seems anything but controllable. Their book offers everything from step-by-step instructions for how to do your paperwork and navigate the healthcare system to answers to questions you might be afraid to ask your doctor. Get advice for how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you’d hoped, and how to talk to your children about your will. There are also lessons for survivors, like how to shut down a loved one’s social media accounts, clean out the house, and write a great eulogy.

Medical Aid in Dying: 

Compassion and Choices

Compassion & Choices is the nation’s oldest, largest and most active nonprofit working to improve care and expand options for the end of life.  To learn more about the Colorado End-of-Life Options Act here.

Death With Dignity

Death With Dignity provides information, education, and support about Death with Dignity as an end-of-life option to patients, family members, legislators, advocates, healthcare and end-of-life care professionals, media, and the interested public.

American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying

Information for physicians and patients on developing, improving and supporting best practices for the care of patients considering or completing aid in dying. The Academy provides an active Patient-to-Doctor Referral System for patients who are considering medical aid in dying.

Finding Meaning:

What really matters at the end of life

At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it's simply comfort, respect, love. BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative medicine physician who thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. Take the time to savor this moving TED Talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life.

Regrets of the Dying

A Palliative care nurse shares the simple, yet profound insights from people facing their own mortality. When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. In this article, she writes about the most common five.

Hospice Care:

End Game

A close look at the beauty and pain of hospice care. End Game is a short documentary that follows the last few days of terminally ill patients. The heart-rending film highlights the work of doctors and caregivers who are reimagining what palliative care and hospice work can be. End Game embodies the commitment and compassion that is crucial to cutting-edge palliative care, helping families and patients travel the difficult journey together.

The Nurse with the Purple Hair 

The Nurse with the Purple Hair is a warm and inspiring documentary about end-of-life care. The film features hospice nurse Michelle Lasota and is directed by world-renowned filmmaker Sean Cunningham. The film honors hospice professionals and the mind-body-spirit services they provide.  Our message is simple: Be brave enough to have an end-of-life conversation that matters. 

Hospice Nurse Julie

Hospice Nurse Julie (aka Julie McFadden) has taken TikTok and Instagram by storm with her straightforward talk about the particulars of dying and her mission to decrease the fear surrounding the natural process of death.

Grief and Loss:

All There Is with Anderson Cooper

In this podcast, Anderson Cooper takes us on a deeply personal exploration of loss and grief. He starts recording while packing up the apartment of his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt. Going through her journals and keepsakes, as well as things left behind by his father and brother, Cooper begins a series of emotional and moving conversations about the people we lose, the things they leave behind, and how to live on - with loss, with laughter, and with love.

The Grief Recovery Handbook

Based on a proven action program, The Grief Recovery Handbook offers grievers the specific actions needed to move beyond losses including Death, Divorce, Health, Career, and Faith.