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Showing posts from July, 2010

How do we spend our days?

A blog post by Peter Bregman linked to two really interesting other pieces: an interactive graphic showing how different portions of the population spend their time each day , and a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande asking some pretty profound questions about what we -- and health care providers -- ought to do when death is clearly approaching . I think about this latter topic probably more than I should, but maybe that's understandable since my father and Ben's parents are all in their 80s and having had the experience of my mother's death in a hospice in 2002. When I read these things about all this denial by doctors pussy-footing around and patients who can't accept the inevitability of death and prepare appropriately, I think, jeez, I could do better than that, I would face the truth and concentrate on quality of life, yadda yadda. But maybe I'm kidding myself. Especially with young children, I might fight to the end for a few more minutes with them. The thin