Supporting your Dying Loved One (Dr. Lani Leary)

The experience of caring for a loved one through terminal illness and eventual loss can be incredibly isolating and emotionally overwhelming. We’ll be discussing Dr. Lani Leary’s book “No One Has To Die Alone” and offer listeners accessible insights, practical tools, and personal stories for supporting your dying loved one. Learn how to provide a sense of community, profound relief, and deep meaning for both caregiver and patient through illness, death, and bereavement.

Listen to the Series

Show Highlights:

Listen to Part 1: Making Meaning out of our Loved Ones Death: Learn how Dr. Lani Leary created her life purpose to help those who may feel unable to help when faced with a parent or loved one’s death. Hear Lani’s Near Death Experience and how her own face with death helped her understand that death was not to be feared.
Listen to Part 2: Meaningful Conversations with the Dying: Dr. Lani Leary offers her advice on what to say to your loved ones and the types of questions you may want to ask before they pass to honor their spirit and life. Dr. Lani Leary shares the conversations she had when she found out her father was dying of Stage 4 cancer.
Listen to Part 3: Creating strong family support for your Dying loved one: How to pull the family together in fulfilling the various roles needed in carrying for a loved one’s passing. How to enroll a family member that is denial about the whole situation?
Listen to Part 4: Helping Children Understand and Appreciate Dying as Natural Part of Life: Children are not naturally afraid of death. How can you teach children about death and bring them into the process.

About our Guest:

Lani Leary, Ph.D. specializes in work with chronically ill, dying, and bereaved clients. She has worked for the past 25 years as a psychotherapist in private practice, as a chaplain in the intensive care unit of a hospital, and as a counselor in 6 hospices across the country.

She served as the director of mental health services at an AIDS clinic, as a professor of Death Studies at George Mason University, and as a researcher at the National Cancer Institute of NIH. Lani has spoken nationally at over 250 conferences including the American Holistic Medical Association, Virginia Association of Hospices, Spirituality and Healthcare, International Sudden Infant Death Symposium, and Omega Institute of Holistic Studies.

She is the author of Healing Hands, an internationally best-selling audio tape about therapeutic touch and complimentary approaches to pain management. She is certified in grief therapy, EMDR, hypnotherapy, and Critical Incident Stress Management.

Her book, No One Has To Die Alone: Preparing for a Meaningful Death, will be released in April 2012 by Simon & Schuster Publishing Co.

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