Please save the dates for three informative and important conversations. Additional details to follow.
What Matters. Planning for Illness and/or the End of Life: Necessary Paperwork or Catalyst for Reflection, Self-knowledge, Connection, and Depth?
Mondays, October 26 & November 16, 2026
6:30 pm
(In-person and Online)
Elders Housing Needs and Options with Karen Wasserman, Founder and Director of Your Elder Experts at JF&CS
Monday, December 14, 2026
6:30 pm
(In-person and Online)
Many people have not completed advanced directives for when illness or end of life approaches, or if they have, they did so long ago. Without the loving and sometimes hard conversations about what matters to you, and up-to-date documents, people are too often unprepared for illnesses and/or the dying process. While the focus of Michele’s work is on end-of-life, whether solo or partnered, everyone 18 and older should have these documents and review/revise them across their lifespan.
Knowing these topics are emotion stirring, in this series of workshops, presenter Michele Bograd, PhD, will weave together a nuanced and informative introduction to the many aspects of Healthcare Advanced Directives including Healthcare Proxy (who will speak for you when you can’t speak for yourself) and Living Wills (what you want, or don’t want), the POLST, dementia and VSED directives, potentially complicated dynamics with medical proxies, CPR/DNR data, and more.
She will also highlight how too often directives are neither sufficient nor carefully and repeatedly communicated, to the great hardship for the individual and those around them. At their best, creating or reviewing directives creates a critical opportunity to clarify one’s wishes and values about living and dying, to engage in essential conversations with family and friends, and to optimize—if you can—the living, dying and death process, both for you and those who care about you.
The goals of the workshops are:
1) to provide up-to-date information about the range of directives available;
2) to highlight misunderstandings about the scope or impact of directives;
3) to demonstrate that one’s values or wishes, reflected in directives, evolve over our lifetimes, so the directives must evolve as well;
4) to emphasize that family/social circle conversations and understandings are the foundation for the implementation of directives;
5) to surface personal and/or family dynamics that can either optimize or silence necessary conversations about illness or the end of life;
6) to highlight and make available some advanced planning toolkits, however the focus of these workshops will not be on filling out the forms—if there is interest in doing that in community, this may be planned for a later date.
7) To help us work through and learn from the often emotional experience of doing this work.
About Michele Bograd, PhD:
After decades as an individual, couples and family therapist, Michele became an end-of-life doula serving those with life-limiting illness and those who love and care for them. As part of this commitment, she teaches about advanced directives including Healthcare Proxy (who will speak for you when you can’t speak for yourself) and Living Wills (what you want, or don’t want).
Michele has worked in a hospice house and in the community with people with life-limiting illness. She has taught therapists about death literacy, grief and bereavement, and how not to ignore existential realities in our sessions. She has taught end-of-life doulas nationally and locally about presence and witnessing, how to accompany those who are dying, how to consider ideas of “the good death,” and the social obstacles to care and services at the end of life. She has also led many community workshops on facing death, grief, end-of-life directives, and family dynamics at the end of life. Her work blends practical information with self-reflection and support for turning towards topics many people would rather avoid. Her interest is not only individual and familial but systemic: how do communities such as congregations create a container for living with illness and dying, death and grief?