Engage with Grace

Thanks to my friend Bob Coffield at The Health Care Blog who is encouraging this important coversation in families. Asking you to take a moment this weekend to discuss your desires for how to live the end of your life as meaningfully as possible--If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version hereMatthew Holt

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented �blog rally� to promote Engage With Grace � a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.
It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations � our closest friends and family.
Our original mission � to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes � hasn�t changed. But it�s been quite a year � so we thought this holiday, we�d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We�ve included them at the end of this post. They�re not easy questions, but they are important.
To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we�d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this � just five questions in plain, simple language � can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.
So with that, we�ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.



Over the past year there�s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we�ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.



One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife�s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.



Wishing you and yours a holiday that�s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )