A symposium called the “Measure of our Days: Awakening Hope in Aging, Loss and Death” will be held at St. John's on the Lake (1800 N. Prospect Ave.) from March 4-8. Guest speakers will address issues related to the important role of spirituality in aging, illness and dying. The five-day event will include a series of presentations by prominent scholars, music and meditation.
Aging includes loss, and engages us in bereavement and grief, says Kent Mayfield, a featured speaker and one of the event organizers. "We know we're moving toward death," he says. "To ignore that as a reality of senior life would not be appropriate. This year's programming focuses on that dimension of the experience."
Jessica Nutik Zitter, author of Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life and an ICU and palliative care physician, based in Oakland, California, will be a featured speaker at the symposium. Zitter was featured in “Extremis,” an award-winning short documentary nominated for an Academy Award in 2016. Zitter is concerned with end-of-life care and believes that technology is sometimes used inappropriately, depriving dying patients of a dignified and spiritual death.
"On the part of the family, technology is the final act of love on the patient, which is clearly misguided," Zitter says. "On the part of the physician, it is the final act of expertise and professional intent, which is again, misguided if you understand the limits of those technologies in end-stage illness, and also if you understand the amount of suffering technology inflicts in end-stage illness."
While attending a Jewish health conference recently, Zitter says she came up with the idea of creating another commandment: Don't worship the false god of technology. Too few people have paid sufficient attention to end-of-life planning. "I think we pray to the god of technology to solve our sadness, to solve our fear of the unknown, to solve our avoidance of confronting death and looking inside at ourselves," she says.
"For us to ignore religious and spiritual needs in the hospital environment really is depriving people of a very important support and therapeutic interest that can really be beneficial," Zitter adds. "The moment you die is such a crucial moment in a life. It's not like you ever have a do-over on that. It's like having a baby, like getting married. It's a moment. It's very meaningful, not only for the person who's dying but for those around. It's very important to get it right."
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Zitter used LaCrosse, Wisconsin as a positive example of a place where 96% of people have advanced directives for end-of-life care. Nationally, about 30% of the population have advanced directives in place.
She says end-of-life conversations with people who have signed advanced directives are much easier because they have put thought into it. It is much more complicated to have end-of-life conversations with people who never thought about what they wanted at the end of their lives.
Zitter is encouraged that in some pockets of communities the conversation is starting to take place in the lay community "where people wake up to this issue and say 'hey, wait, wait, I want better,' " she says. It also has to happen in the healthcare industry. "We have to have infrastructure that supports patients right to die well," she says. "We don't right now. I think even our hospices—many of them—are not consistently delivering that complete patient support that I would like to see."
A post-conference will take place on March 9-10. Speakers will focus on financial and healthcare planning, as well as end-of-life planning for African-Americans and LGBTQ individuals.
