Creating Memories with Dr. Karen Smith

Join Elizabeth Coplan and Dr. Karen Smith, Clinical Ethicist, LCSW, Ph.D., Henry Ford Health System.  She is also VP of the Funeral Consumer Alliance. Dr. Smith provides independent ethics consultations, ethics policy development and ethics education for hospital staff. Her passion is sharing ethics with medical professionals and the community and assisting families during difficult decisions. She specializes in death and dying issues and lecture on a variety of healthcare related ethical issues. 

Today on our podcast Dr. Smith talks of her work with families to create memorable dying memories. The concept is that during that awful, but special time when you know you are sharing your last weeks, days, hours with someone that often there is "a time" when things can be reframed, to focus on the pure love between you and the person dying.  At these times I tell families that "THIS will be what you remember MOST about this time" .   It is setting a positive intention to not remember the pain, the tiredness, the overwhelming loss but to focus on the the love, the truly being there, with your loved one.   Sometimes this time is memorialize if possible (even after death sometimes) in a photo of the linked hands of family members over the sheets of their loved one. It may be making a handprint, it may be simply creating a memory of a "good day" where you were able to talk, laugh, or do something together (go outside, to the chapel, a special visitor).