Let’s be frank. Death and dying are extremely heavy topics in our society. Let’s break through this painful topic head-on, together.
Death and dying are rarely discussed. We often experience immense uncomfortability with the ‘great unknown’. We grapple with the uncertainty of death. It is foreign. We aren’t taught how to process it. We haven’t yet come to an understanding of death, therefore death can seem forced upon us, rather than accepted as an integral experience inherent within our collective humanness.
Since issues that accompany death and dying are not processed cognitively, then the notion of children dying is incomprehensible. It is easy – as well as understandable – to want to block out the thought of children dying.
A residential children’s hospice home is technically a building where children go to pass among family and friends.
Sit with this fact for a moment.
Crescent Cove is building the first respite and hospice home for children in Minnesota.
Sit with this fact for a moment.
Crescent Cove is becoming a sacred space, place, and time that will allow children who are actively in the process of passing to LIVE FULLY and pass with dignity among their family and friends.
In an attempt for us to confront death and dying, think about this. If you had to bring your child to Crescent Cove, you would NOT just sit there quietly and crowd around your child, murmuring, waiting for them to die.
At a residential children’s hospice home parents and children are together, holding each other, praying, kissing, hugging, snuggling, laughing, saying EVERYTHING they need to say WHEN they need to say it, singing, crying, reading, allowing to be enveloped in music, breathing in familiar smells, creating, having guests swing by, sharing phenomenal meals, enjoying deeply rich conversations, experiencing transitions and dimension that allow unique insights that are only born through grief, going out to do whatever is wanted when feeling well enough (which is forbidden in hospitals because they will not let you off their property due to “liability”), comforted by familiar movies, saying good-byes (or with us, saying our “see-you-later”’s, because, like the Sioux, we don’t believe in the concept of good-bye) and finding boundless ways of BEING together…how life should be…LIVING FULLY – even at the end, when you don’t want the end to be here.
Written by J. Zachary A. Tift, father of Maryah Tift – aka “Champ” (May 7, 1994-May 15, 2010), and Ringman (retired)