Phyllis Shacter's husband made a series of radical choices about how his life would end. When he received two life limiting diagnoses within six weeks of each other, Alzheimers and cancer, he refused cancer treatment and employed natural methods instead. He planned and participated in his own funeral and followed what he believed was best for him, choosing to stop eating and drinking before he was unable to consciously decide how his life would end. Throughout all of these experiences and decisions, he had a supporter and advocate in his wife Phyllis. Understanding the choices he was making, she stood as a pillar to his right to end life in the way that was right for him. He left her with a mission; by sharing his story, she would contribute to the conversation on end of life options. Powered by her love of him and the peace and beauty he felt at the end of his life, she speaks powerfully for taking our lives in our own hands and fully exploring what is best for each of us.

Phyllis Shacter has been a teacher, business consultant, life coach and public speaker. Today she uses her skills to share her personal story as a platform to educate others about expanding end of life choices. Her book, Choosing to Die, is both a memoir and a guidebook and is the first personal story ever written about VSED (Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking).

Phyllis' husband decided to VSED rather than live into the late stages of Alzheimer's. Choosing to Die is their love story. It is a book about their partnership and the brave territory they traversed, including how they prepared themselves with proper medical and legal guidance.

It is available on Amazon.com. She is a frequent speaker and educator about this topic. Her TEDx talk, "Not Here By Choice" is on the Home Page of her informative website, www.PhyllisShacter.com.

When our friends and loved ones face a crisis, we often don't know what to say. Do we say anything at all? What if we say the wrong thing? Nearly everyone who has faced a hard time has heard things that weren't so helpful. But worse yet is silence, saying nothing. Emily McDowell faced such a time and, as a graphic designer, she chose to respond by doing what she loved- creating cards that say what is most helpful in bad times. Her empathy cards not only helped people reach out; by sharing she also helped people in similar circumstances feel heard and seen! Her tremendous success with the cards inevitably led to a book, There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love.

What does a poet do when she suffers the loss of her father? She writes. Exploring the depths of her relationship with her dad, Naomi Shihab Nye writes with the beauty of love, loss and continuing relationship. Her father wanted them to write a book together, and though this didn't quite happen before his death, he jumps off of every page. His particular viewpoint as an immigrant informs her outlook too and so we are offered a rare poetic view of our culture and the danger of imposing our politics on other peoples. Personal and political, Transfer is most deeply a love poem to the father who raised her, schooled her and loved her. She gives us inspiration towards our own expression of the losses in our lives, making something exquisitely beautiful out of pain and loss. In this hour, we will talk about the loss and what it was like to write about her father after his death.

Naomi Shihab Nye lives in old downtown San Antonio, Texas, a block from the sleepy river. She has written or edited 30 previous books including Red Suitcase, Fuel, and You and Yours with BOA Editions, Ltd. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her collection Honeybee was awarded an Arab-American Book Award. Her poetry anthologies include Time You Let Me In, What Have You Lost?, and This Same Sky. She is also the author of the novels Habibi and Going. Her book of short-short fiction from Greenwillow books is called There is No Distance Now. She is the two-time winner of the Jane Addams Book Award for Peace & Justice, and four-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, as well as the recipient of several fellowships, including a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. She is currently serving on the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets.