Fighting to Honor a Father’s Last Wish: To Die at Home

Tying into last week’s news of the new report titled “Dying on America” I will recommend two stories that bring the report into the most personal of terms.

Here’s a past blog I did describing a gripping, highly rated book called, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. It puts what is imparted in the new report into very poignant, personal, compelling terms.

Just like the book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door, an article in the September 25, 2014 New York Times, called “Fighting to Honor a Father’s Last Wish: To Die at Home” is a heartbreaker.

Both the New York Times article and Knocking on Heaven’s Door put a human face on what “Dying in America” recommends, in the most poignant, heartbreaking ways.

The New York Times article describes a very beautiful, loving, highly functional American family. Despite the daughter’s tenacious, enduring fight to bring her father home, and at great personal sacrifice, our current system kept her father away from home. Most of his final years were spent bouncing between various forms of expensive, often negligent, in-patient care.

Home would have offered the father far more dignity and quality of life, much less suffering, at far less cost. The article beautifully, heartbreakingly, illustrates this.

Quoting from the article, “Many geriatric experts say that if the wasteful medical spending on this stage of life could be redirected, it could pay for all the social supports and services actually needed by today’s fragile elders and their families. Instead, public money has been shuffled in the same system, benefiting health care businesses but not necessarily patients.”

The changes recommended would most likely come at a net savings to the government. I hope reporting like this, combined with public lobbying, brings the recommended changes.