Vincent Dodd

Death is a clear-cut objective moment, but the process of dying and the choices we make for our own death and others is a wholly different subject. Not becoming educated on your ability to influence your dying process is leaving that potentially long helpless period to fate. Raw and informative, this book explores the truth and asserts your right to knowledge and your right to say "No" to medical procedures that ultimately only prolong suffering once imminent and inevitable death arrives. What can be done to decrease unnecessary suffering before inevitable death? This suffering is almost always influenced by a fear or lack of acceptance of death. For the most part the healthcare field cannot stop this pain and suffering due to many influences beyond its control, unless you know how to protect yourself. Ultimately, it is up to the patient or their medical guardian to ensure a peaceful and dignified death. It is obvious Vincent cares deeply about your awareness, knowledge, and choices, as well as your control of your body and your own health care. He cares to see your fears of this often dark and taboo subject decreased and hopefully alleviated. His professional and personal caring perspectives come from twenty-one years of bedside emergency and intensive care nursing in teaching hospitals, followed by fourteen more years of advocating for both the dying and the living to pilot their own health care. He takes a look at an otherwise bitterly-avoided subject that we all must face and turns it into a highly informative, easy, and at times even funny to read. There is a sweet icing on this normally hard-to-stomach cake known as dying, death, and grief: the author also has some great input on how not only to stay alive longer, but to feel more alive.

We are more divided than ever in too many aspects of life, and we too often feel various levels of emptiness while pushing to keep up or protect ourselves from all that is coming at us. Our Life, Our Work, Our Humanness explores our relationships with ourselves and others, and how our stressors and society's negative influences affect and slowly tear us down. What helps is empowering yourself with more and easier options, so the bad effects you less and can even become a powerful lesson to greater peace. Bad will periodically happen to all of us. However, finding more goodness between the bad, and how we handle most of it, can become easier. We, and our lives, are built of emotions, relationships, concerns, expectations, harsh realities, and painfully even politics. Vincent is trusting us to open-up about his thirty-four years of front-line public service in both emergency nursing and law enforcement. He then trusts us further to look at our shared difficulties and tragedies as humans, his personal life mistakes, lessons, observations, and what made it all easier. He validates our issues and pains, then quickly moves to solution-based concepts and functional tools to tame our life stressors. The author writes: I am periodically asked, "With the amount of tragedy and death you have seen, how do you still laugh and love life so?" Sometimes the same question is worded differently, by ending in, ". . . how can you always be so happy?" My answer to the first question is that life is hard, yet an amazing and unfortunately short, powerful journey. So yes, I do find the good, the lessons, and the laughter, as often as I can. My answer to the second question is the same, but it starts with, "I am not always happy . . ." We are human, and that is a messy condition. Sometimes bad is just bad. Yet, seeing and working with the bad from new perspectives can make often help it be much less bad. This book is for those who want less conflict and desire a more meaningful and peaceful life filled with greater joy, exploration, and ease.

Death is a clear-cut objective moment, but the process of dying and the choices we make for our own death and others is a wholly different subject. Not becoming educated on your ability to influence your dying process is leaving that potentially long helpless period to fate. Raw and informative, this book explores the truth and asserts your right to knowledge and your right to say "No" to medical procedures that ultimately only prolong suffering once imminent and inevitable death arrives. What can be done to decrease unnecessary suffering before inevitable death? This suffering is almost always influenced by a fear or lack of acceptance of death. For the most part the healthcare field cannot stop this pain and suffering due to many influences beyond its control, unless you know how to protect yourself. Ultimately, it is up to the patient or their medical guardian to ensure a peaceful and dignified death. It is obvious Vincent cares deeply about your awareness, knowledge, and choices, as well as your control of your body and your own health care. He cares to see your fears of this often dark and taboo subject decreased and hopefully alleviated. His professional and personal caring perspectives come from twenty-one years of bedside emergency and intensive care nursing in teaching hospitals, followed by fourteen more years of advocating for both the dying and the living to pilot their own health care. He takes a look at an otherwise bitterly-avoided subject that we all must face and turns it into a highly informative, easy, and at times even funny to read. There is a sweet icing on this normally hard-to-stomach cake known as dying, death, and grief: the author also has some great input on how not only to stay alive longer, but to feel more alive.

We are more divided than ever in too many aspects of life, and we too often feel various levels of emptiness while pushing to keep up or protect ourselves from all that is coming at us. Our Life, Our Work, Our Humanness explores our relationships with ourselves and others, and how our stressors and society's negative influences affect and slowly tear us down. What helps is empowering yourself with more and easier options, so the bad effects you less and can even become a powerful lesson to greater peace. Bad will periodically happen to all of us. However, finding more goodness between the bad, and how we handle most of it, can become easier. We, and our lives, are built of emotions, relationships, concerns, expectations, harsh realities, and painfully even politics. Vincent is trusting us to open-up about his thirty-four years of front-line public service in both emergency nursing and law enforcement. He then trusts us further to look at our shared difficulties and tragedies as humans, his personal life mistakes, lessons, observations, and what made it all easier. He validates our issues and pains, then quickly moves to solution-based concepts and functional tools to tame our life stressors. The author writes: I am periodically asked, "With the amount of tragedy and death you have seen, how do you still laugh and love life so?" Sometimes the same question is worded differently, by ending in, ". . . how can you always be so happy?" My answer to the first question is that life is hard, yet an amazing and unfortunately short, powerful journey. So yes, I do find the good, the lessons, and the laughter, as often as I can. My answer to the second question is the same, but it starts with, "I am not always happy . . ." We are human, and that is a messy condition. Sometimes bad is just bad. Yet, seeing and working with the bad from new perspectives can make often help it be much less bad. This book is for those who want less conflict and desire a more meaningful and peaceful life filled with greater joy, exploration, and ease.

This Palgrave Pivot strives to recount and understand Indigenous Law, as set within a remote community in northern Australia. It pays close attention to the realpolitik and high-level political functioning of Indigenous Laws, which inspires a discussion of how this Law models the relational, influences governance and emplaces people in an ordered kincentric lifeworld. The book argues that Indigenous Law can be examined for the ways in which it is a deliberate, stabilizing and powerful force to maintain communal order in relation to country, a counter framing to popular and ‘soft law or soft power asset’ visions of such Laws often held in the national and international imaginary. It is the latter which too often renders this knowledge esoteric and relinquishes it to a category of lore or folklore. This is an open access book.