Let's Talk About Death
Asking the Questions that Profoundly Change the Way We Live and Die
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
Experts in end-of-life care tell us that we should talk about death and dying with relatives and friends, but how do we get such conversations off the ground in a society that historically has avoided the topic? This book provides one example of such a conversation. The coauthors take up challenging questions about pain, caregiving, grief, and what comes after death. Their unlikely collaboration is itself connected to death: the murders of two of Irene's closest friends and Steve's support in perpetuating memories of those friends' lives and not just their violent ends.The authors share the results of a no-holds-barred discussion they conducted for several years over email. Readers can consider a range of views on complicated issues to which there are no right answers. Letting ourselves pose certain questions has the potential to profoundly change the way we think about death, how we choose to die, and, just as importantly, the way we live.Honest, probing, sensitive, and even humorous at times, the completely open discussions in this book will help readers deal with a topic that most of us try to avoid but that everyone will face eventually.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The epistolary construction of this book demonstrates by example that death is a subject best approached through dialogue. Coauthors Gordon and Kacandes, respectively a massage therapist and a college professor, present nearly four years of email correspondence on a topic that is, in modern society, often considered taboo. Conversational in tone, their exchanges which touch on caregiving, medications, and the right to die, among other things should be more relatable for the average reader than the usual medical or political discourse about these topics. At times, the emails seem to have undergone too much editing after the fact, disrupting the sense of an authentic conversation taking place. The genuine investment of both authors, however, is always evident; readers receive a sense of their personal experiences with mortality throughout, from an opening reference to the unsolved murders of two of Kacandes's fellow Dartmouth professors in 2001, to her own closing confrontation with cancer. Though this is not the first book to seek for factual information, it warmly meets common end-of-life fears with, at the very least, the reassurance that one is not alone.
