A Matter of Life and Death

I have spent most of my professional life in the company of the dying in one way or another: as a parish curate on pastoral visits to those dying at home, as a hospice chaplain working as part of a multidisciplinary care team providing palliative and end of life care, and as a hospital chaplain responding to the spiritual needs of patients in the many forms of dying found in a typical hospital from A&E to intensive care. I have been a clinical leader overseeing specialist palliative care services, and a researcher who from time to time has had the privilege of sitting with people who had only weeks still to live and wanted to tell me how they make sense of their mortality.