No One Dies Alone

Seven years ago, a Catholic hospital in Eugene, Ore., launched a program that was so simple, it’s hard to believe no one had thought of it before: If terminal patients are facing their last hours with no family or friends around, why not have a volunteer sit beside them to provide spiritual comfort?

Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, adopted in 2007 the “No One Dies Alone” program, now called Compassionate Care for the Dying. United Methodist laywoman Denice Foose is the hospital’s bereavement coordinator who supervises volunteers. She talked recently with staff writer Bill Fentum.

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Bag of Randomness

  • No surprise here.
  • It turns out that once again FEMA is letting a lot of hurricane ice melt away.  I say go to schools and make a lot of snow cones and then let the leftover ice melt away.  The PR alone for the snow cones would overshadow the negative press of the melting ice.
  • OK, that idea sounded like a scenario in a bad Disney movie.
  • Chris Dodd – Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs – sure is sounding tough about the financial crises.  It’s almost as if he is auditioning for the Treasury Secretary gig, but let’s not put the cart in front of the horse.
  • I had a roommate named Chris Dodd.
  • An interesting read on how Sweden got out of a similar economic mess.
  • For the fans of the Fail Blog, the Denver Post has this interesting pic.
  • Can you imagine the panic if Social Security was even partly invested in the market right now?  Now in all fairness, the gains for lets say ten years in a conservative fund would probably offset this current market catastrophe adjustment, but I find the thought a bit interesting.
  • I was doing some research on Ronald Reagan recently and this photo caught my attention.  It looks like that flag pole is about to damage that painting.
  • I find it interesting that the Reagan Archives link is on the University of Texas servers, per the URL.  I may have used the incorrect terminology, but in short I don’t understand why “utexas.edu” is in the URL.  The moment you click on “ARCHIVES” from the library’s URL (http://www.reaganlibrary.com/) you are taken to the “utexas.edu” link.  I tried to find a reason, but nada.
  • I switched over to the CBS Evening News and saw Katie Couric asking tough questions to McCain and Obama such as, “What’s your favorite movie?”
  • Maybe I’m a little hard on Katie, sometimes it’s good to see the softer side of the candidates to see how we can possibly relate to them.  She will be interviewing Palin today.
  • Speaking of Palin, my caption for this photo – Palin Wins Olympic Medal
  • The Promise in Glenrose turns 20 – I’ve never been.
  • By polling standards, there are three ways to measure Evangelicals.
  • I received another belated birthday gift, and it’s another book.  I think my friends are politely encouraging me to read, and believe it or not, it’s working.
  • This particular book is A Public Faith by Charles Drew.  It’s a non-biased religion/politics book that was written before the 2000 election, and the strange part is, a lot of it is a bit prophetic.  So far I’m only through two chapters, but this part towards the end of second chapter about the first war in Iraq just has me thinking a lot:  And Paul would especially have urged us to pray that somehow the people of Iraq would not be given the impression that Christian America was their enemy.  For to have linked the United States with the Christian God, a linkage that sadly many Americans came close to making during that war, would have been to declare that an Iraqi citizen would commit treason if he or she ever converted to Jesus Christ.
  • For fans of the late David Foster Wallace, you may enjoy reading a syllabus he handed out.
  • I had a car dealership that tried to pull this trick on me.
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