“When you know better, you do better.”
Maya Angelou
ON LIVING
As a hospice chaplain, Kerry Egan didn’t offer sermons or prayers, unless they were requested; in fact, she found, the dying rarely want to talk about God, at least not overtly. Instead, she discovered she’d been granted an invaluable chance to witness firsthand what she calls the “spiritual work of dying”—the work of finding or making meaning of one’s life, the experiences it’s contained and the people
Napkin Notes
Garth Callaghan doesn’t know how long he has to live. But he can be certain of one simple thing: No matter his fate, his daughter, Emma, will find a handwritten note inside her lunchbox each day until she graduates from high school.
Cancer has given Garth Callaghan a new purpose: to inspire parents to connect more with their children even in small ways, as he has done before and since his diagnosis by tucking a napkin note into his daughter’s lunch every day.
Gone From My Sight
Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience is well known in end of life education as “The Little Blue Book.” This was the first, the primary source, and remains the most widely used patient/family booklet on the signs of approaching death. It also contains Henry Van Dyke’s poem about death.
The biggest fear of watching someone die is fear of the unknown; not knowing what dying will be like or when death will actually occur. The booklet Gone From My Sight explains simply, with no medical terminology, the normal process of dying and stages of approaching death from disease.
The Mercy Papers
When Robin Romm’s The Mother Garden was published, The New York Times Book Review called her “a close-up magician,” saying, “hers is the oldest kind [of magic] we know: the ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally to hold the end at bay.” In her searing memoir The Mercy Papers, Romm uses this magic to expand the weeks before her mother’s death into a story about a daughter in the moments before and after loss.
With a striking mix of humor and honesty, Romm ushers us into a world where an obstinate hospice nurse tries to heal through pamphlets and a yelping grandfather squirrels away money in a shoe-shine kit. Untrained dogs scamper about as strangers and friends rally around death, offering sympathy as they clamor for attention.
Being Mortal
From Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine – and lives.
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make.
The Best Care Possible
A doctor on the front lines of hospital care illuminates one of the most important and controversial social issues of our time.
It is harder to die in this country than ever before. Though the vast majority of Americans would prefer to die at home—which hospice care provides—many of us spend our last days fearful and in pain in a healthcare system ruled by high-tech procedures and a philosophy to “fight disease and illness at all cost.”
Extreme Measures
An ICU and palliative care specialist offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level.
Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care—to become an ICU physician—and imagined herself rescuing patients from the brink of death. But when, during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come
back to life, she began to question her choice.