FACING DEATH PERSONALLY
For your community
One of the core features of end of life care is having important conversations.
It is crucial that these conversations are open and honest, always with the aim of helping patients to express their desires, feelings, fears and wishes.
It’s natural to want to try to be positive around those with a serious and life-limiting illness, and you might feel you are taking away hope when talking about death.
Coming to terms with our mortality is a universal challenge. Supporting those with a serious and life-limiting illness in acknowledging the reality, helping them to move through the pain and suffering and arrive at a place of finding and making meaning in it, is the task of living and dying well.
Helping people die well
It may seem strange that you can think of death as something that you ‘do well’, but there are few things that we would want more for ourselves or our loved ones, other than a good death.
Providing great care
Looking after someone on the journey to the end of their life, is about more than the day to day physical support.
It’s also about understanding and addressing the needs of their mind, body and soul.
A Catholic understanding of palliative care
Palliative Care is not something to be scared of. It is a holistic and comprehensive form of care for people who are living with a life-limiting illness (this may also be known as a terminal illness).
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture spirituality plays an important role. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people the existence of life beyond the physical realm is a very strong belief.
Further reading
Additional Living Well Dying Well resources to help you support someone in your network who is facing death.
Contact us
Contact Living Well Dying Well for more information, additional support or to provide feedback.