"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light," wrote Irish poet Dylan Thomas about not going peacefully into that good night, death.
Yesterday's LA Times had a story about veterans making that final passage. The article, entitled "Helping the Brave Fight Their Final Battle," is linked here.
The article talks about a book by a nurse practitioner who is the director of the hospice program at the Bay Pines, Fla. VA. The book is called Peace at Last: Stories of Hope and Healing for Veterans and Their Families, by Deborah Grassman.
About the author: Deborah Grassman is a Nurse Practitioner at Bay Pines VA Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has been with the VA for 25 years and has been the Director of the Hospice Program at the VA for the last 14 years. She has been a featured speaker at Hospice conferences throughout the United States and has published articles on providing Hospice care to veterans in numerous professional journals. She pioneered identifying the effects of past trauma on the quality of a person s dying process, as well as ways to effectively respond to issues that surface at the end of life. She has a B.S. in Nursing and an M.S. in Psych-Mental Health Nursing from the University of South Florida.
Editor's note: In future articles, we will talk more about hospice care and veterans.
