MSI Press Blog

One of the most comforting and helpful resources we found when Carl was in the final days of hospice -- more helpful than what hospice workers could tell us and more than doctors did tell us -- was a little book, called Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience by Barbara Karnes, RN. As Carl went through each predicted and predictable stage from being distant mentally, to not eating, and then to not drinking, this little book told us the range of expectations and what was happening to his body in preparation for death in relation to what he was and was not doing. The book description on Amazon is very accurate:  The biggest fear of watching someone die is fear of the unknown; not knowing what dying will be like or when death will actually occur. The booklet "Gone From My Sight" explains in a simple, gentle yet direct manner the process of dying from disease. Dying from disease is not like it is portrayed in the movies. Yet movies, not life, have become our role models. Death

    Excerpt from  A Believer-in-Waiting  by Elizabeth Mahlou.  A Simple Grace It all began with prayer, but which prayer began it all I do not know. It may have been the grace I was coerced into saying five years ago. Or, it may have been the prayer of my sister Danielle five decades earlier. I used to think it was the former. Now, in reviewing the whole expanse of my life, I rather think it may have been the latter.   Danielle’s Prayer The “8-pack,” a moniker given to my seven younger siblings and me by my brother Rollie, suffered immense abuse during our childhood. My sister Katrina, in fact, never planned on growing up, certain that she would be killed by Ma before achieving adulthood. However amazing, we all did survive the extensive physical abuse (e.g., being stabbed, thrown into walls, kicked into unconsciousness, pulled down flights of stairs by the hair, and much more), emotional abuse (e.g., being negatively compared with each other, denigrated at every opportunity, and, in o

  We only get to die once (well, usually, NDEs aside). How we die can be just as important as how we live. I wish that thought had been top of the mind when Carl was dying; we might have done things differently. It is not, though, that we did not have examples. We did, actually. Dottie, a dear friend from Massachusetts, had been my secretary when I was in the Army and then opened her house to me and my infant son when, during my later reserve days, the barracks would not allow him in because of his severe breathing issues from which he was in danger of dying nearly every day. (He survived, grew up, and, still with some breathing issues, is living a robust life.) Through all the intervening years, even after I moved to California, Dottie stayed in touch. Then, she got terminal brain cancer. After some initial surgery (and more planned, which, she feared, she would not survive), she decided that she wanted to spend the time she had left visiting all her family, which had spread out acros

  Excerpt from Tucker & Me (Harvey) - RIDING THE WILD MATTRESS               I was a planned Cesarean birth. The doctor gave my mother a choice of several dates for delivery, and she picked the seventeenth. This was because her birthday was on the seventeenth, albeit in a different month. This was part of an inordinate role the number seventeen played in our family.                      I was brought home as a baby to our residence in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. I only lived there until I was two years old, but it was always referred to as the Hermosa Vista House, in reference to the name of the street. The street number was 417, thus continuing an odd streak of the number seventeen in our family residences. After that house, we lived in the city of Alhambra, with a street address of 1717. The next home we moved to the address was simply 17. Ultimately, the family settled in another town, where the house numbers were 1728. That’s an awful lot of seventeens for one fam