Health, Aging and Society Assistant Professor Nicole Dalmer named inaugural Global Fellow in End-of-Life Care

Nicole Dalmer, assistant professor in Health, Aging and Society, has been named one of seven Fellows in End-of-Life Care with Completed Life Initiative and Death with Dignity.

The year-long fellowship re-imagines our relationship to death and seeks to positively impact how we live our lives and how we die.

We caught up with Dalmer to talk about the fellowship, what it means to her and what good end-of-life care looks like to her.

How did it feel being awarded this fellowship? Why do you think it’s so special?

I was admittedly a bit shocked – I had read over 80 individuals from around the world had applied for the Fellowship program! Being selected has been particularly special given that it’s the inaugural cohort of Fellows and I’m the sole Canadian on board. I’m looking forward to meeting with and learning from the Fellows (which include thanatologists, death doulas, human rights lawyers, academics, and physicians) who bring a variety of expertise and experiences linked to end-of-life care.

The fact that this Fellowship even exists is quite encouraging as it reflects, I think, a slowly growing openness, socially, to discussing and engaging with topics connected to dying, death, and bereavement.

What will you be doing during the fellowship?

In this year-long program, a cohort of 7 Fellows (from Peru, Kenya, Germany, the USA, and Canada) will create and complete projects to spark reflection and re-evaluation, and further the global conversation of end-of-life care. Co-founded by the Completed Life Initiative and Death with Dignity, the ultimate goal of this Fellowship is that together, our work will positively impact how we live our lives and how we die. My particular project draws on my own background in library and information science to look at older adults’ information practices related to end-of-life care. Individuals’ engagement with information related to end-of-life care remains understudied, particularly among older adults. My study asks: how is end-of-life care information made available, searched, and exchanged among older adult communities? My hope is that findings from this study can inform the design and development of accessible information about this topic.

What does good end-of-life care look like to you?

I think about this question often, typically as I’m teaching HLTHAGE 4B03: Death and Dying in Later Life. We spend time thinking about what a “good death” means, drawing from research that speaks to the importance of independence, autonomy, control, and peace. Good end-of-life care is one that allows for those elements of a good death to take place. For this to happen, though, we need to actually talk about what (and/or who) we want our deaths to involve. This is rather difficult given that socially, we tend to avoid thinking or talking about death; death is viewed as something to be resisted and feared. In thinking more about good end-of-life care and what it could ‘look like’, I’ve also been inspired by my colleagues Julia Brassolotto and Albert Banerjee’s recent thinking about between link between age-friendly and death-friendly communities, where conversations about aging, dying, death, loss, and care are normalized and where death might be reframed as a communal issue rather than an individual, medicalized problem.