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Doesn’t a healthcare professional know what is best for a patient making medical decisions? Seems like a simple question and answer. They are the professional with much more experience and knowledge, of course they know what the best decision should be. Maybe not. David Hilfiker warned me against forcing my will on patients. I wrote about Dr. Hilfiker and his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in my last blog. It was he who helped me make a huge improvement in my book Hard Choices for Loving People. In the first edition of my book (1990) I discuss CPR and feeding tubes and offer help to those making decisions about these treatments. Sometime in 1988 or ’89 I sent an early draft of Hard Choices to a dozen or so professionals for comment. Two people made the exact opposite observation about my writing. Dr. Hilfiker wrote something like, “Hank, you are much too forceful in telling people what they should do with these medical decisions. You have disguised it as a discussion but it is obvious the conclusion you want people to make.” I had spent several years in a therapy group led by Elizabeth O’Connor. Besides her life as a therapist she was more »

I never thought I would see those two words together. Alzheimer’s and hope. Well, maybe, “I hope I never get Alzheimer’s.” Okay…I’ve heard that a lot. I have been reading some really hopeful stuff from someone with Alzheimer’s Disease. David Hilfiker, a physician, is on a mission to make this eventually fatal disease less scary. Last September he was diagnosed with mild progressive dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. The Washington Post ran a story about David’s life now and his new vocation as one who is losing his mind. Dr. Hilfiker has spent his life excelling. High School valedictorian. Standout at Yale. Med school grad and rural physician. Inner city physician for the poor. Founder of Joseph’s House, a hospice for homeless people with fatal diseases. Author of three books. Husband of 44 years, father and grandfather. Our paths have actually crossed. We were members of the same faith community and in a mission group together for a while in the early 80s. I sent him a draft of my first book, “Hard Choices for Loving People,” and he was so kind to offer significant suggestions for improvement. That’s a whole other story. I had lost touch with him and then saw more »

Gordon Cosby is the man partly responsible for my 30-year career as a healthcare chaplain. Few outside a certain circle have ever heard about him or the congregation he co-founded with his wife, Mary, the Church of the Saviour (CofS). But there is a rather wide circle of folks who owe much of who we are to Gordon and Mary. He died this week at 94. I left a thriving church youth ministry in Macon, Georgia in 1978 and moved my family to Washington, DC, just so I could be part of what he and Mary started. What they had done drew scores, if not hundreds, to leave home, jobs, and traditional churches behind. So we sold a home in Macon and put all our worldly belongings in a Ryder truck and moved here with our two kids. I worked as a carpenter for a year then for four years directed one of CofS’s ministries trying to create jobs for hard-to-employ people. Gordon preceded me at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville by maybe 35 years. He served as an army chaplain with a combat unit in the Second World War. Convinced there was a better way to do more »