With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

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Unfortunately in our society we seem to have become afraid of dying and being able to talk to people facing death.

Most outrageous was the agitated woman given medication to counteract the agitation some other medication had caused. The book is unique in giving a doctor’s perspective but telling the stories of patients and their families, so we see a whole range of emotions and attitudes: denial, anger, regret, fear and so on.

One person’s good death is not another’s – we all need to find our own way to take our bow and leave the stage. Not all passing can be gentle and not everyone can be brought to acceptance in the face of their own obliteration. If you find Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End a worthy read, you should definitely look this one up. A must read for everyone in healthcare and in community services, but also for the rest of us westerners, who think medical science has outmoded death.

Her mission is to “reclaim public understanding of dying” and to bring individuality and joy back into our dealings with the dead – and so, in From Here to Eternity, she embarks on a journey of discovery: to the only open pyre in America; to a sky burial in Tibet, where the body breaker slices the corpse into parts, pounds the flesh with a mallet, mixes it with barley flour and yak butter or milk, and leaves it to the shrieking vultures to consume; to burial towers in India; to the people of Tana Toraja in Indonesia, where mummified bodies are cared for in their home (offered food, dressed, even given a bed with the living) over months or years until the family can sacrifice an animal and put the dead to their final rest; to Barcelona’s mass bone pits; Mexico’s Day of the Dead.And secondly, Mannix and all of the wider NHS staff that we meet along the way are nearly all calm and happy and lovely.