Religion and Politics

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

In The New York Times Magazine, Jon Mooallem profiles B.J. Miller, a palliative care doctor who is pioneering new approaches to the end of life. Miller was the executive director of Zen Hospice, a small facility in San Francisco that is informed by Buddhism. Miller gained empathy for his patients through his own near-death experience: As a young adult, an accident left him as triple-amputee. Mooallem writes, “He resolved to think of his suffering as simply a ‘variation on a theme we all deal with — to be human is really hard,’ he says. … He wondered what would happen if you could ‘reincorporate your version of reality, of normalcy, to accommodate suffering.'”

Read at The New York Times Magazine

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