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

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From beginning to end, I appreciated Kathryn's open, honest, and thoughtful approach, with personal stories told sensitively in a heart-warming way. It’s clear she feels she’s been honored to work with the dying, and she’s helped to propagate a healthy approach to death.

She is also aware of the lack of information about the process that is available to patients and their families. This was not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because it was a two-week loan and I was conscious of needing to move on to other longlist books. I really would hope that this book would be widely read and not simply by those directly interested from a medical perspective - as the author tells us we will all die one day.By turns touching, tragic, at times funny and always wise, they offer us illumination, models for action, and hope.

Mannix's sincere loving care and compassion radiate from the pages of this beautifully written account of her daily life, professional training, clinical practice and most of all, fragile patients. we are privileged to accompany people through moments of enormous meaning and power; moments to be remembered and retold as family legends and, if we get the care right, to reassure and encourage future generations as they face these great events themselves. Mild, tender and conciliatory, I would like her to be my compassionate, wise doctor when I lie dying.Starting in cancer care and changing career to become a pioneer of the new discipline of palliative medicine, she has worked in teams in hospices, hospitals and in patients’ own homes to deliver palliative care, optimising quality of life even as death is approaching. An emotional journey through one woman’s experience working in palliative medicine that challenges pre conceptions about the field while encouraging thoughts and discussions around our own mortality. As the hospice leader she's working with on Holly's case describes it to Holly's daughters: 'Have you noticed that she stops breathing from time to time?

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Not all passing can be gentle and not everyone can be brought to acceptance in the face of their own obliteration. Do we do things we can look back in satisfaction on, or things that we'll look back and regret when we're on our deathbed (other places to die are available). Most outrageous was the agitated woman given medication to counteract the agitation some other medication had caused.

I was particularly touched by the stories of Sally, a young woman dying from melanoma who refused to accept that her condition was terminal, and Holly, a mum of two teenagers dying from cancer of the cervix, who suffered from a last bout of restless energy before passing away. I believe in adding life to my years, not vice versa if that means losing all the basic dignities and quality of human life.I tried to read it from a dual perspective, as a professional and academic in this field but also as a person inquisitive about their own death and those of my loved ones. Tears were never far from my eyes as I read about a head teacher with motor neurone disease; a pair of women with metastatic breast cancer who broke their hips and ended up as hospice roommates; a beautiful young woman who didn’t want to stop wearing her skinny jeans even though they were exacerbating her nerve pain, as then she’d feel like she’d given up; and a husband and wife who each thought the other didn’t know she was dying of cancer.