Engage with Grace

With the Thanksgiving holiday this weekend, I’m turning the blog over to public service.

Some conversations are easier than others.

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success last year, with over 100 bloggers participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

The original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. I’ve included them at the end of this post.  They’re not easy questions to answer, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, I’m going to start with five parallel questions that are easy to answer:

The Easy Questions:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality, and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, I’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

The Hard Questions:

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

Updated links to others in the blog rally:

• Engage with Grace (Blog Rally) on Laika’s MedLibLog
• Engage with Grace — Reprise by Paul Levy of Running a Hospital
• 2009 Engage With Grace Thanksgiving Weekend Blog Rally by Bob Coffield of the Health Care Law Blog
• Engage with Grace Blog Rally by Jud DeLoss at Jazz Ramblings
• Engage with Grace The One Slide Project on Dr. Shock
• Engage with Grace Blog Rally by Gerald DeLoss on HIT Blawg
• Suture for a Living
• Trusted.MD
• Grief Healing
• Engaging with Grace – encore performance by Jessica Lipnack for Endless Knots
• Public Healthcare Promotion
• Engage With Grace: Your End-of-Life Wishes on Fresh Widow
• Thanksgiving Conversations About Health – Engage With Grace Blog Rally on Health Policy and Communications Blog
• Beating Social Anxiety
• Grief, Loss & Transitions – Journey of Hearts Blog
• Howard J. Luks MD
• Engage with Grace this Thanksgiving by Dr. V on 33 Charts
• Engage with Grace by Patti Anklam on Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
• Operation Marathon
• David Fisher, MD, MPH
• Diva Marketing Blog
• e-patients.net by Susannah Fox
• Health Populi by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
• EMed Concepts
• NickDawson.net
• Justin Deal