ABSTRACT
The author has been practicing in the field of thanatology for six decades as a clinician, researcher, lecturer, and author working in the areas of bereavement, psychosocial oncology, occupational stress, palliative care, survivorship, spirituality, and compassion. She attributes her interest in the field to her brother’s death when she was 3 1/2 and an experience of listening to a lecture on grief by Dr. Thomas Hackett when she was a nursing student. This chapter explores how her diagnosis of stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma four decades ago opened her up to a new way of looking at life, how we are all interconnected, and the significance of spirituality and compassion in our life and work. Briefly acknowledging the work of those who have influenced her current thinking, she looks at how recent experiences have led her to realize that her experience of coming to compassion started with the death of her brother and continues to the present.
