Dr. Elise Lark ‘14(GSLC, PhD) Founder of the nonprofit Circle of Friends for the Dying, recently secured the bequest of the home to establish Jim & Lisa’s Circle Home, located in the heart of Kingston’s Rondout National Historic District in New York state, it will be a comfortable and peaceful dwelling for hospice-eligible individuals in need of a home to live out their last months and days, as an alternative to an institutional care setting.
Circle Home will be the first community-supported home for the dying in the Mid-Hudson Valley region. The home will also serve as a center for death literacy, intergenerational caregiving, and “service-learning opportunities,” offering future health care providers a unique opportunity to engage in direct bedside care within a “low tech, high touch” environment. Circle Home is part of a larger national and global movement to reclaim death as a social rather than medical enterprise, to return care of the dying back into the hands of laypersons rather than professionals, and to change the culture of end-of-life care. Elise recently accepted the position of Circle Home Director. The home is currently under renovation and is expected to open later this year.
Read Dr. Lark’s dissertation Making Space for Dying: Portraits of Living with Dying here.