Hand in Hand: Aging Together in the Spirit

This program offers live and interactive engagement with Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s End of Life Working Group’s new resource, A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life.

A Tender Time is a unique collection of Quaker voices, historical and contemporary, that explores practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of aging, dying well, and making end-of-life decisions guided by the Spirit and Quaker values. It moves in widening circles, from aging to dying, and from primary caregivers, to friends, to the whole faith community.

This program includes three sessions, which will be recorded and made available to registrants only. Friends will be invited into the themes of the book:

September 4: Aging in the Spirit – Finding Your Own Way
How do cultural, familial, and personal assumptions about aging affect you? Together we will look at new ways you could frame your experience of age, recognizing both losses and grace.

September 11: Befriending Your Mortality
What models of dying – uncomfortable and/or beautiful – have you encountered? Together we will look at how you might choose to frame a good death.

September 18: Beyond Death: Continuing Relationships
A relationship does not end when someone dies. Together we will discover ways to affirm connection and make meaning after a death.

It is not necessary to have read the book to participate. Please bring paper or your journal for reflective queries.

Download the flyer to share with your community

Leaders

Patti Nesbitt is a retired palliative care nurse, traveling minister, and graduate of the School of the Spirit. Surviving cancer made her unafraid of death and willing to companion people with terminal diagnoses. She has served on numerous committees for her monthly meeting and for Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM). She clerks BYM’s End of Life Working Group and is co-author of  A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life. Patti is a member of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting in Maryland.

Eileen Stanzione is a licensed clinical social worker with a passion for working with the dying and the bereaved. For more than 40 years, she worked extensively in hospice and as a dialysis social worker. She taught graduate courses at West Virginia and Salisbury Universities and maintains a private practice, specializing in grief work. Eileen co-clerks Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Pastoral Care Committee and is a member of Patapsco Friends Meeting in Maryland.

Kristin Camitta Zimet has served as an EMT, a musician with a chaplaincy program for children at hospitals in New York City, and a patient care volunteer for Blue Ridge Hospice and Winchester Medical Center in Virginia. Kristin is a two-time cancer survivor and was a long-time primary caregiver. She is the co-author of  A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life  and the author of a book of poems, Take in My Arms the Dark. She is a member of Hopewell Centre Monthly Meeting in Virginia.