Jim Towey Founder of Aging with Dignity, Five Wishes, & Author of "To Love and Be Loved: A personal portrait of Mother Teresa"

All Home Care Matters

Enriched Life Home Care Services

Education, Health & Fitness

5.0 • 88 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All Home Care Matters was honored to welcome a distinguished guest, Mr. Jim Towey.

Jim Towey was a trusted advisor and personal friend of Mother Teresa of Calcutta for twelve years and did the first reading at her Mass of Canonization in Saint Peter’s Square. He headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under George W. Bush and served on his senior staff.

Jim's career spans the presidency of two Catholic colleges for thirteen years, a seven-year stint as a US Senate staffer, and the leadership of Florida’s 40,000-employee health and human services agency. In 1996, with Mother Teresa’s encouragement, he founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Aging with Dignity and created the Five Wishes advance directive, which has sold over 40 million copies and is used in all fifty states.

Towey met his wife, Mary, in Mother Teresa’s Washington, DC, AIDS home, and they have five children and three grandchildren. He continues to provide pro bono legal services for the Missionaries of Charity. His book, To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa, was published by Simon and Schuster in September 2022.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All Home Care Matters, the show where we discuss all things home care with discussions on important age-related matters and topics.
0:10.1	Brought to you by Enriched Life Home Care Services, the number one rated home care provider in Michigan by Top Rated Local.
0:23.4	Hello and welcome back to All Home Care Matters.
0:25.9	If this is your first time visiting us here at the show, we want to say thank you for taking
0:29.6	time out to be with us today.
0:31.2	We appreciate how valuable everyone's time is, and that's why we try and make each episode
0:36.0	here at All Home Care Matters, something that will hopefully we try and make each episode here at all home care matters,
0:38.0	something that will hopefully matter to you. Today, we have the distinct honor of welcoming
0:43.2	Mr. Jim Toey, the founder of Aging with Dignity, Five Wishes, and the author of the book,
0:49.6	To Love and Be Loved, a Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa. Welcome, Mr. Tuwee. Great to be with you,
0:56.9	Lansom. Thank you. It's our pleasure. So may we call you, Jim? Please. So Jim, let's, for our viewers
1:04.4	and listeners, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit of background, what ultimately led to
1:08.8	the creation of aging with dignity and then subsequently
1:12.4	five wishes, they would love to learn a little bit more about your experience and background.
1:18.1	Well, back in 1996, when I started aging with dignity, I was concerned about the gathering
1:26.9	clouds of assisted suicide and euthanasia that were forming.
1:30.8	Because, you know, and I felt that Americans deserved a better choice between pain or poison.
1:37.0	And the reality is we weren't giving very good palliative care.
1:40.2	We weren't giving patient self-determination rights.
1:43.2	So they had a say in their care decisions.
1:46.3	And so it was just not a good situation.
1:48.7	I thought, well, there has to be a third way.
	...

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