The Backstory

Jen has been drawn to death, dying and end-of-life care for many years.

There are two notable early influences on Jen’s path. First, in the 1990’s, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, also known as Dr. Death, because he believed that people dying of terminal illnesses deserved to consciously end their suffering by physician-assisted suicide, had a profound impact. He was a very controversial figure and was arrested, convicted of murder and served prison time for helping a man with progressed ALS die. Living in the midst of this cultural phenomenon, Jen’s perspective was clear that people should have the right to self-determination at the end of life. In 2022, ten states in the US legally allow for what is now called death with dignity. Ohio is not one of them. Read about Dr. Kevorkian here.

The next seminal influence for Jen was reading the book How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland which demythologizes the process of dying. Nuland states, “My intention is not to depict it as a horror-filled sequence of painful and disgusting degradations, but to present it in its biological and clinical reality.” And he succeeds. Jen’s experience of learning how we actually die by a variety of causes was sobering, eye opening and freeing. Once she understood the biological underpinnings, it wasn’t as scary and she could be more objective about her own death and the deaths of her people.

Her mother died of cancer in 2003. Jen lived in France at the time but spent many months with her sister at their mother’s bedside to help care for her. Part of that experience is shared in a blog article here. As time happens along, other people in Jen’s life died – family members, acquaintances, friends. It’s the way of life – the longer one lives – the more people die in your sphere. For Jen, Death has become her Teacher – the wisest among many teachers throughout her lifetime.