Uploaded July 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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“Poetry and the End of Life” event on December 5, 2013. The end of a life is not solitary: it is our shared fate, a through-passing universally experienced, witnessed, and attended. This multi-faceted evening brought together the words and thoughts of poets, caregivers, physicians, medical educators, and hospice chaplains. The conversation illuminates and shares some of the ways art makes possible a more enlarged awareness and more intimate embrace of what has been called by novelist Henry James “the distinguished thing,” and by Zen “the Great Matter”—a transition and challenge met and faced from many directions throughout the course of every human existence.

1. Poet Sandra Gilbert reading with Shira Kammen accompanying on violin
2. Dr. Steven Pantilat, director of UCSF Palliative Care Leadership Center
3. Dr. Victor Valcour, UCSF Assoc. Professor of Geriatric Medicine & Neurology
4. Dr. Mary De May, Hellman Family Distinguished Professor of Neurology
5. Poets Jane Hirshfield & Sandra Gilbert with Shira Kammen on violin
6. Frank Ostaseski, pioneering hospice founder and end of life educator
7. Tova Green, hospice chaplain volunteer
8. Dr. Guy Micco, co-director of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program