The Art of Caring

Art of Living, Art of Dying

Carlo Leget, PhD

I first learned of Dr. Carlo Leget’s moving work on helping patients and families approaching the end of life prepare for death at the International Congress on Palliative Care in fall 2014 in Montreal. I listened intensely to the five questions that he artfully connected back to the Middle Ages psychology found in ars moriendi and left the plenary audience reflecting on the meaning of his questions in the 21st century. At the recent Annual Assembly, the plenary on design thinking also questioned our societal need for a how-to guide for dying.
—Cory Ingram, MD MS FAAHPM

In the summer of 2016, my sister Angélique died at 50 years old. Liek, as we called her, was the eldest of my two younger sisters and in many ways my opposite. We both started looking for the meaning of life from a young age. I looked for answers outside myself, studying theology and listening to the great minds of philosophy and theology. My sister looked for answers inside herself, following courses to develop her intuition. One of the biggest clashes we had happened 10 years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I strongly advised her to undergo radiation and chemotherapy as soon as possible, and she insisted on taking time to listen to what these malicious cells in her body wanted to tell her. In the end, she had an operation followed by radiation therapy, but chemotherapy was out of the question for her. In the years that followed, the cancer seemed to have gone.