Conducting Life Interviews:
A Legacy Workshop with author Maryanne O’Hara
Thursday, October 28
11:00 am – Virtual
Sponsored by the Misher Festival of Fine Arts and Medical Humanities
Register here for Zoom event.
Award-winning author and end-of-life doula Maryanne O’Hara
is offering a workshop on How to Conduct a Life Interview with Your
Loved One or Yourself—instruction on how we can gather and preserve
our most precious stories. Life interviews offer an opportunity for
people to reflect on their lives and shape their life stories, regardless of
age or current health. Such recordings are gifts for the future, offering
others a way forward, a path that might light the way.
Maryanne O’Hara’s daughter, Caitlin, was born with cystic fibrosis and
diagnosed at age two. When she reached adulthood and her quality of
life began to deteriorate from the disease, it became clear she would
need a lung transplant to survive. O’Hara laser-focused on the positive: a successful outcome
that would allow her daughter to return to independent living. People do survive lung
transplants; Caitlin did not. O’Hara outlived her daughter and was left wondering why she hadn’t
gathered up as much of Caitlin while she could. Made more recordings, asked more questions,
given her daughter the power to author her legacy.
After her daughter’s death, she trained as a certified end-of-life doula at the University of
Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine. End-of-life doulas provide support and comfort to clients
and their families at the end of life. Like a birth doula, only at the other end. Maryanne’s favorite
part of that training was legacy work––in particular, life interviews.
In this one-hour workshop, O’Hara will talk about how to avoid missed opportunities and provide
practical tips on the language to use, questions to ask, and framing that helps put the subject at
ease.
Free and open to all USciences students, staff, faculty, and alumni!
See other side to learn about the USciences Book Club discussion of Maryanne O’Hara’s latest book > > >
USciences Book Club presents
LITTLE MATCHES:
A Memoir of Grief and Light
by Maryanne O’Hara
Thursday, October 28
12:00 noon – Virtual
Register here for Zoom event.
Sponsored by the Misher Festival of Fine Arts and Medical Humanities
“Novelist Maryanne O’Hara illuminates a mother’s grief over the loss of
her adult child and her quest for hope and wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly
“To the stalwart scientists and physicians who go to battle in service of
the seriously sick, who peer into microscopes and imagine the
unseeable deep within to discover cures, I urge you to pick up your
heads and look through the lens of O’Hara’s LITTLE MATCHES to fully
understand your power, to know what is at stake in your pursuits, and
to feel the weight of what happens if we fail.” —Patrick R. Connelly,
Ph.D., Senior Vertex Fellow and patented co-inventor of the genemodifying cystic fibrosis drugs Kalydeco & Orkambi, Vertex
Pharmaceuticals
“LITTLE MATCHES is the bravest and most generous of memoirs. It is
the diary of your dearest friend, intimate and universal, an exquisitely
written poem of deepest love, grief, and devotion. This is a journey of the soul. I feel haunted by these
pages and profoundly blessed to have read them.” —Lisa Genova, neuroscientist and author of the New
York Times bestsellers Still Alice and Every Note Played
“This luminous, harrowing memoir reads like a mystery, even though we know how the story
(heartbreakingly) ends. This is a tale of a mother’s devotion and grief, yes, but when I closed LITTLE
MATCHES, tears standing still in my eyes, I was left with a sense that I had met not one but two
remarkable spirits, my world enlarged.” —Dani Shapiro, author of the New York Times bestseller
Inheritance