To Tend What Cannot Be Cured
Palliative reflections on care, collapse, and staying human
Written July 17 2025
The past two months have been one long crisis in my household, moving from one medical emergency to the next.
My mother lives with me and my wife. She has a number of chronic health conditions that require caregiving support, but she had been fairly stable and independent. A series of unfortunate events and complications have had us in the hospital five times this summer, and in what feels like just about every doctor’s office in the area.
It has been a whirlwind of the worst kind. There have been moments of great care and support…but there’s been others, too. Scary moments. Times when I’ve cried because a doctor made me feel ignored or unimportant. And many times when we have been confused about what to do to keep my mom safe.
This week, my mom had her first appointment with a palliative care nurse practitioner. It was amazing, refreshing, and a totally different way of experiencing conventional medical care in the US.
As they listened deeply, tended to my mom’s needs, and included me in their care, I began to soften. When they spoke of healing touch therapy and meditation to support my mom, while holding her hand and embracing her in a soft hug, waves of relief began to wash over me. For the first time in months, I felt like I didn’t have to hold everything alone.
This experience of palliative care has me wondering:
What might we learn from this model to show up for a world in pain? A world that is suffering ecologically, socially, and spiritually?
What is Palliative Care?
Many people either don’t know what palliative care is, or confuse it with hospice care (end-of-life comfort care for terminally ill patients). Palliative care isn’t that.
It is a holistic, person-centered approach to care that focuses on improving the quality of life for people with serious, life-limiting illnesses. It can be offered alongside curative treatments and it doesn’t need a terminal illness diagnosis.
Where traditional disease management will ask, “What’s wrong and how do we fix it?”, palliative care instead asks, “What do you need to live well, even in the midst of this?”
How does it work?
Palliative care focuses on improving a person’s quality of life, however they define it. It’s not about giving up on treatment or hope; it’s about making space for comfort, dignity, and what matters most.
At its heart, palliative care prioritizes relief from suffering. That includes managing physical pain and side effects, but it goes far beyond. Through a whole-person lens, it also addresses emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual needs.
A palliative care team helps patients and their loved ones navigate complex medical decisions in ways that align with their values, priorities, and goals.
Importantly, palliative care also supports caregivers. That might look like education about the illness, planning for respite, or simply offering a place to process the grief, stress, and overwhelm that can come with supporting someone through major illness.
In short, palliative care is about tending to the person and the circle around them, with presence, compassion, and care.
Applying the Palliative Model to a Suffering World
What if we looked at our communities and our planet in the way that a palliative care team looks at a person in pain?
We are living in the midst of collective, overlapping crises: climate catastrophe, collapse of empire, forced mass displacement, ecological grief, political violence. Many of us are holding too much and many of us are unraveling at the seams. And still, we long to offer care and we need care ourselves.
Palliative care teaches us that even when a cure isn’t possible, care is always possible.
We can begin by asking:
What does our community need to feel even a little more whole today?
What does our planet need to feel heard and witnessed?
What do we need, as caregivers (for ourselves, our communities, and the world), to keep showing up with integrity?
Instead of rushing in with the urge to fix and “solve” every broken thing in our personal and collective lives, we can learn to tend.
To sit beside pain. To ease suffering where we can. And to prioritize dignity, comfort, and presence in a world that demands speed and productivity.
What might palliative care for the world look like?
Relief of Suffering
Showing up with food, supplies, or presence for people navigating crisis — not just as a one-time act, but as part of a mutual rhythm of care
Joining direct action or local organizing to interrupt violence, forced displacement, or ecological harm
Building community fridges, free stores, and seed libraries to share what we have
Deepening our community networks by offering to drive someone to an appointment, helping with child care, or translating for someone in need
Whole-Planet Care
Refusing to separate “nature” from people, seeing ecosystems as kin and co-conspirators
Restoring damaged land, planting native species, tending waterways
Honoring grief for what’s been lost (species, lands, ways of beings) and making space for mourning and reverence
Centering Earth not just in climate strategy but in spiritual practices and decision-making
Quality of Life, Even in Collapse
Making space for joy without guilt: meals, music, storytelling, rest, dancing
Holding rituals, grief circles, or seasonal celebrations to reconnect with natural cycles of time, with spirit, and with one another
Refuse urgency culture by prioritizing slowness, tenderness, and the dignity of care over constant doing
Community-Rooted Care
Honoring relational interdependence — recognizing that we survive and thrive together, not alone
Letting those most impacted by harm lead, and listening when they say, “we’ve already been doing this”
Trusting people to know their own needs and resourcing them directly without shame or control
Remembering and reviving ancestral healing practices
Building networks of care that don’t rely on burnout but on shared responsibility
Care is Still Possible
This kind of care won’t undo the harm already done. It will not stop the tidal wave of every crisis we face.
But, it can help us live through this moment on Earth together, with more dignity, more connection, and more tenderness.
Care is not a distraction from the work of change.
Care is the work.
It is what makes a different future possible.
A palliative politics does not ask us to be heroes or miracle workers. It asks us to be present, tender, and real. To choose to live like life is sacred, even in a sick and dying world. And to choose to be together, in community.
Care — offered honestly, imperfectly, in the midst of it all — is how we will stay human. It is how we will endure. And it may just be how we begin again.
