Living and Dying in Sao Paulo, Brazil

For the second year in a row, Zen Caregiving Project Executive Director, Roy Remer was a guest speaker at the Infinito Conference on Living and Dying in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This weeklong event brought attendees from all over Brazil to talk about palliative and end-of-life care. In the Economist Magazine’s 2015 Quality of Death Index, Brazil ranked 42/80, and the US ranked 9th. There is a group of committed individuals in Brazil who are working to change the status of palliative care in the country.

Infinito co-founder and organizers, Tom Almeida and Dr. Anna Claudia Quintana attended a Zen Caregiving Project Mindful Caregiving Education course in 2017 in San Francisco. Soon after Tom invited Roy Remer to attend the 2018 Infinito Conference.

This year, with other international speakers, Roy Remer presented on the main stage. Roy’s talk, Hospice Volunteering: Transformation through Service, shared the transformative power of serving at the bedside of persons living their final days of life.

In addition to the mainstage presentation, Roy led a daylong Open Death Conversation workshop for thirty participants. According to Roy, “There is a great hunger for activities and engagement around the topic of death in Sao Paulo. The palliative care movement in Brazil is just beginning, but I believe we in the US can help shorten the timeline of developing an impactful hospice and palliative care movement.”

Roy is also supporting the process of creating a residential hospice facility in Sao Paulo. During his time in Brazil, he visited Clinica Florence, a 37-bed respite and hospice care facility in the city of Salvador.

There he spent time with staff sharing the Zen Caregiving Project approach and leading them through mindfulness and loss activities.

“Clinica Florence is a beautiful facility, though its uniqueness is really in the way senior management is creating a culture of compassionate and mindful care. I am confident the Clinica Florence model will spread throughout Brazil.“

The deepening relationship between Zen Caregiving Project and Infinito in Brazil represents how we are spreading our impact beyond the Bay Area.