The Good Death
A Guide for Supporting Your Loved One through the End of Life
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
There is no harder life experience than caring for a loved one who is dying. This book will empower you approach this monumental transition with empathy, patience and peace of mind.
After working as a hospice nurse for many years, Suzanne O’Brien founded the Doulagivers Institute in 2012, which has since trained hundreds of thousands of death doulas around the world to provide a peaceful and dignified death for loved ones and their families. The Good Death brings together everything Suzanne has learned during her decades in healthcare to provide you with a simple, step-by-step guide to preparing for the future death of someone close to you, as well as helping them through the actual passing when the time comes.
Full of practical tools to approach the death of a loved one with dignity, knowledge and compassion, this book will equip you with everything you need to know to prepare for a financial, physical, mental, emotional and spiritually good death – both for you, and for your loved one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Brien draws on her work as a hospice nurse and death doula in her compassionate debut guide to end-of-life care. Exploring modern discomfort with death, she argues that scientific advances have "medicalized" dying, eroding its humanity as patients are funneled through a health system that "keeps people breathing at all costs" without accounting for their quality of life or discussing what to expect at the end. She unpacks how best to navigate that system by detailing the stages of common end-of-life diseases like lung cancer, how to interpret pain cues to keep the patient comfortable, and how to help them formulate advance directives. More broadly, she advises readers on how to assist the dying person in sorting through weighty emotions, reviewing financial arrangements for the funeral, and drawing up a will. Such advice is worthwhile, and O'Brien's anecdotes about caring for the dying are reassuring, even if she stumbles into generalizations in a less helpful chapter on how spirituality manifests at the end of life. Still, caregivers seeking practical and emotional support will find plenty of value.
