Engaging with Grace Blog Rally

Updated 3/2017-- video and all links (except to my own posts) removed as many are no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

The past couple of years during Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers have participated in a “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

The original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed.  At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Think about them, document them, share them. 

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here

While you are engaging your family in a health care discussion, perhaps, you could engage your family into creating a medical family tree. 

Map out your family medical history
Here’s how to create your medical family tree.

1. Find out your ancestry. Include the country or countries where you ancestors came from originally. Some ancestries, like Jews of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) descent, have a higher risk for certain cancers.

2. List blood relatives. Include your first- (parents, siblings, children) and second- (nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, grandparents) degree relatives. Add the current age of each or the age when they died.

3. Add cancer diagnoses, if any. Include the age when they were diagnosed with cancer, if you can find that out. List details, such as the part of the body where the cancer started and how the cancer was treated (chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery).

4. Include any birth defects or genetic disorders that you learn about.
Use the Surgeon General’s Office Family Health Portrait. This online tool helps track all family-related diseases, not just cancer………….