A Support Group for Dying Patients

Confrontation with the inevitability of one’s death has long been considered a necessary part of authentic living. Philosophers from Plato to the twentieth-century existential thinkers have held that in order to learn to live well, one must first learn to die. But only comparatively recently have clinicians sought to help dying patients and their families integrate the knowledge of impending death with they way they live their lives. The time of facing death is one of sadness and mourning, but it is also a time of reorientation and a time of reconsidering one’s values, one’s priorities, and one’s sense of meaning in life. In this article, we shall describe a group approach to the care of the dying patient, an approach which ministers both to the anguish of dying and to the vitality which a confrontation with death may stimulate in the life which remains to the patient.