Healthcare Decisions Week

Presents both practical and spiritual guidance for readers reaching the end of life, offering suggestions on funeral services, a service planning checklist, and learning to budget for burial costs.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot....

"Built on her wildly popular Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a breathtaking memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38 year old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years, after her terminal cancer diagnosis"--

"In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end. Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty...

"Felix Pink is a retired widower leading a boring life and hoping to die a boring death. He volunteers as an Exiteer-someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence to take the burden off their loved ones. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his...

"...Finish Strong is for those of us who want an end-of-life experience to match the life we've enjoyed. We know we should prepare, but are unsure how to think and talk about it, how to live true to our values and priorities, and how to make our wishes stick. The usual advice about advance directives and conversations is important but woefully inadequate. This book describes concrete action in the here and now to help live our best lives to the end....

In 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Since then, more than 500 Oregonians have taken their mortality into their own hands. Filmmaker Peter Richardson gently enters the lives of the terminally ill as they consider whether--and when--to end their lives by lethal overdose. Richardson examines both sides of the complex, emotionally charged issue. What emerges is a life-affirming, staggeringly powerful portrait...

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.