Fifty years after the bullet Ron Hoffman instinctively took to protect his mother, his memoir reveals how his personal healing is woven into his work with over 1000 families with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Since the founding of his organization Compassionate Care ALS (CCALS), Ron has worked with individuals, families and healthcare professionals across the United States inviting conversations around the choices and possibilities that arise for those living with a terminal illness.
Ron’s driving force is his determination to change the systems that can hinder rather than help the dying. In writing Sacred Bullet, he has found yet another way to reach out and share his expertise.
“This book should be required reading for all tenders. It could start a revolution, a compassionate revolution.”
– Valerie Brown Lester, scholar, translator, and author of “Fasten Your Seat Belts! History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin”, and “Phiz, the Man who Drew Dickens.”
Ron regularly leads in-services and trainings for hospice workers, health care professionals and students.
Vision and Aim
Ron Hoffman challenges our death denying culture to re-examine our costly dependence on the search for a “silver bullet” or a cure for every disease. His work impresses upon others a creative relationship with the “sacred bullet” of our mortality. He asks life-changing questions about how we might individually and collectively dance courageously with our dying.
Ron has honed the Olympic sport of tending, what many call caregiving, much like a biathlete. He moves with speed and agility through his days only to stop and take aim to find the right action in what is oftentimes a context of chaos and shock. Speed, agility, accuracy and precision are benchmarks of Ron’s work as he tends to those with terminal illness.
Founder of Compassionate Care ALS
Ron Hoffman co-founded the Gordon T. Heald ALS Fund along with Elizabeth Heald following the death of her husband Gordon in 1998. When providing services to ALS families, CCALS works with each family individually identifying their needs and assessing the level of desired assistance.
Though CCALS specifically serves those afflicted with ALS, the unique scope of Ron’s work ignites hope in the face of hopelessness and engages possibilities where seemingly there are none. CCALS eases the cloud of overwhelming doom and despair without adding to the nightmare of navigating what can be an exhausting and bureaucratic system. Learn more at : www.CCALS.org