Death & Dying Library

Bell, Karen Whitley

Living at the End of Life A Hospice Nurse Addresses the Most Common Questions

Sterling Ethos; (2010)

One of the most respected books on hospice care — for both patients and caregivers.
This warm and informative resource on hospice and other end-of-life care options is written by a hospice nurse. Living at the End of Life reassures us that this difficult time also offers an opportunity to explore and rediscover a richer meaning in life. Drawing on her years of experience, Bell has created a comprehensive, insightful guide to every aspect of hospice care and the final stages of life. For people in hospice, as well as their friends and families, this is an indispensable and trustworthy source of comfort and spiritual healing.

Blackman, Sushila

Graceful Exits How Great Beings Die

(Death stories of Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, and Zen Masters)

Shambhala; 1st Edition (January 1, 2005)

Death is a subject obscured by fear and denial. When we do think of dying, we are more often concerned with how to avoid the pain and suffering that may accompany our death than we are with really confronting the meaning of death and how to approach it. Sushila Blackman places death — and life — in a truer perspective, by telling us of others who have left this world with dignity.

Butler, Katy

Knocking on Heaven’s Door The Path to a Better Way of Death

 Scribner; (2013)

“A thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become.” (NYTimes Book Review). This groundbreaking blend of memoir and investigative reporting, hailed as “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times, ponders the “Good Death” and forces that stand in its way.

Katy Butler was living thousands of miles away when her old but seemingly vigorous father suffered a crippling stroke. She flew East and in time became her parents’ part-time caregiver, thoroughly re-embroiled in the childhood family dynamics she thought she’d left behind.  Her father’s natural suffering was bad enough. But in time she saw it prolonged by an advanced medical device — a pacemaker — that kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, I’m living too long, Katy and her mother faced wrenching moral questions, faced by millions of America’s 28 million caregivers. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, Let my loved one go?

After doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, Butler set out to understand how we had transformed dying from a natural process to a technological flail. Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors and met death head-on.

Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Its provocative thesis is that technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. It also chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is inspiring passionate conversations about lighting the path to a better way of death.

Callahan, Maggie

Final Gifts 

Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying

Simon & Schuster; 1st paperback edition (February 1, 2012)

In this moving and compassionate classic — now updated with new material from the authors — hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley share their intimate experiences with patients at the end of life, drawn from more than twenty years’ experience tending the terminally ill.
Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts— of wisdom, faith, and love — that the dying leave for the living to share.

Filled with practical advice on responding to the requests of the dying and helping them prepare emotionally and spiritually for death, Final Gifts shows how we can help the dying person live fully to the very end.

Callahan, Maggie

Final Journeys A Practical Guide for Bringing Care and Comfort at the End of Life

Bantam: Reprint edition (March 24, 2009)

A guide to understand the special needs of the dying and those who care for them, from the bestselling coauthor of Final Gifts, “Maggie Callanan’s wise, confident voice is an invaluable companion.” — Ira Byock, M.D., author of Dying Well

For more than two decades, hospice nurse Maggie Callanan has tended to the terminally ill and been a cornerstone of support for their loved ones. Now she passes along the lessons she has learned from the experts — her patients. 

From supporting a husband or wife faced with the loss of a spouse to helping a dying mother prepare her children to carry on without her, Callanan’s poignant stories illustrate new ways to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of this difficult and precious time. She brings welcome clarity to medical and ethical concerns, explaining what to expect at every stage.

Designed to be your companion, resource, and advocate from diagnosis through the final hours, Final Journeys will help you keep the lines of communication open, get the help you need, and create the peaceful end we all hope for.

Chast, Roz

Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir

Bloomsbury USA; First edition (2014)

#1 New York Times Bestseller, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, Winner of the inaugural 2014 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Winner of the 2014 Books for a Better Life Award, Winner of the 2015 Reuben Award from National Cartoonists Society

In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast’s memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.

While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies — an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades — the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.

An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant shows the full range of Roz Chast’s talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

Gawande, Atul

Being Mortal Medicine and What Matters in the End

Henry Holt; 1st edition (2014)

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Here he examines its ultimate limitations and failures ― in his own practices as well as others’ ― as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life ― all the way to the very end.

Humphry, Derek

Final Exit The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying

Hemlock Hardback (1991)

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune

Final Exit describes the ways in which a dying person may consider hastening the end of their life if suffering is unbearable. Laws and ethics are outlined in a straightforward fashion. Drug dosage tables and the latest inert gas technique of ‘self-deliverance’ are explained, with illustrations. (a later version the revised, 3rd edition published in 2002, 

Hutchinson, Joyce and Joyce Rupp

May I Walk You Home? Courage and Comfort for Caregivers of the Very Ill

Ave Maria Press; 10th anniversary edition (September 1, 2009)

Reissued on its tenth anniversary, May I Walk You Home? remains an invaluable resource for professional caregivers and loved ones assisting those on their final journey home. Accompanied by the experience and empathy of hospice educator Joyce Hutchison and the wisdom and inspiration of best-selling author Joyce Rupp, readers will discover the courage necessary to embrace the struggles and rewards of this final companionship.

 Joyce Hutchison (1940-2016) was Iowa’s first hospice nurse and an expert on care of the dying. Hutchison served as palliative care coordinator and hospice educator for Iowa Health Hospice and Home Care in Des Moines. A registered nurse, her clinical experience included work as an oncology nurse, home care nurse, and residence team director of a hospice facility. A member of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the Oncology Nursing Society, she also frequently presented workshops on care of the dying and hospice. She was the mother of three and grandmother of nine.

Joyce Rupp is well known for her work as a writer, spiritual midwife, international retreat leader, and conference speaker. She is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Praying Our Goodbyes, Open the Door, and Fragments of Your Ancient Name. Her 2018 book, Boundless Compassion, won awards from the Association of Catholic Publishers and from the Catholic Press Association. Her books Fly While You Still Have Wings and Anchors for the Soul also have earned CPA awards. Rupp is a member of the Servite (Servants of Mary) community.

Kalanithi, Paul

When Breath Becomes Air

Random House; 1st edition (January 12, 2016)

#1 NYT BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

Levine, Stephen

A Year to Live How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

Bell Tower; First edition (1997)

In his new book, Stephen Levine, author of the perennial best-seller Who Dies?, teaches us how to live each moment, each hour, each day mindfully — as if it were all that was left. On his deathbed, Socrates exhorted his followers to practice dying as the highest form of wisdom. Levine decided to live this way himself for a whole year, and now he shares with us how such immediacy radically changes our view of the world and forces us to examine our priorities. Most of us go to extraordinary lengths to ignore, laugh off, or deny the fact that we are going to die, but preparing for death is one of the most rational and rewarding acts of a lifetime. It is an exercise that gives us the opportunity to deal with unfinished business and enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life. Levine provides us with a year-long program of intensely practical strategies and powerful guided meditations to help with this work, so that whenever the ultimate moment does arrive for each of us, we will not feel that it has come too soon.

Schwartz, Morrie

Letting Go Morrie’s Reflections on Living While Dying

Walker; First edition (1996)

At the age of 77, Morrie Schwarz discovered he had a myotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable, progressively disabling and fatal disease. He decided to live life as fully as possible in the time he had left. This book shares his evolving knowledge of living and dying.

Yalom, Irving D.

Staring at the Sun Overcoming the Terror of Death

Jossey-Bass; 1st edition (2008)

Written in Irv Yalom’s inimitable story-telling style, Staring at the Sun is a profoundly encouraging approach to the universal issue of mortality. In this magisterial opus, capping a lifetime of work and personal experience,

Dr. Yalom helps us recognize that the fear of death is at the heart of much of our anxiety. Such recognition is often catalyzed by an “awakening experience” — a dream, or loss (the death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job or home), illness, trauma, or aging.

Once we confront our own mortality, Dr. Yalom writes, we are inspired to rearrange our priorities, communicate more deeply with those we love, appreciate more keenly the beauty of life, and increase our willingness to take the risks necessary for personal fulfillment.

The Eleventh Hour A Caring Guide for the Hours to Minutes Before Death

The Eleventh Hour is used for volunteer training in Transitional, Vigil and No One Dies Alone programs, for hospitals, for nursing facilities, parish nursing and Hospice and Palliative Care agencies. Most of all, it is for families faced with caring for their loved one at end of life. 

My Friend, I Care The Grief Experience

 Intended for the newly grieving, My Friend, I Care addresses the normal process of grieving and the stages of grief while offering suggestions for moving forward into living. The grieving process is as foreign to us as death. The experience is forced upon us by life situations that are beyond our control. We become angry, depressed, fearful and anxious. We do not know that all of these feelings together represent grief; a normal, natural response to the loss of someone or something. No one has taught us what it feels like to grieve. We don’t know how to heal the hurt created by grief or how to live with it. My Friend, I Care offers simple explanations for the thoughts and feelings generated by grief.  

How Do I Know You? Dementia at the End of Life

Caring for someone with dementia presents different challenges than caring for people with other health care issues. Dementia plays by its own rules. This booklet discusses the challenges in providing end of life care when dementia is the main diagnosis. It provides information to the family, friends, and professionals who are caring for and making end of life decisions on behalf of someone with dementia. How Do I Know You? is often given to the family upon admission to the Palliative Care program to help them recognize signs of approaching death when dementia is present. It is also given to families when their loved one with dementia has stopped eating.

Pain at End of Life What You Need to Know About End of Life Comfort and Pain Management

 This booklet is intended for families and professionals dealing with narcotics and pain management as end of life approaches. There can be fear and misconception surrounding pain management at end of life. This booklet is used to ease the confusion and apprehension surrounding narcotic administration. It addresses:

• pain as it relates to the dying process
• fear of overdosing and addiction
• standardized dosages
• around the clock administration
• laxatives
• uses of morphine
• sedation as it relates to dying
• supplemental therapies

A Time to Live Living with a Life-Threatening Illness

 For the newly diagnosed facing a life limiting illness. This booklet addresses issues of comfort, nutrition, and sleep as they relate to the palliative care patient. It provides guidance to help them live the best life they can within the confines of their body and disease.    

When a person receives the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, life as they know it ceases. They find themselves in uncharted territory with no script to follow. Too often they withdraw from the world, as if they have already died. All activity becomes centered on their living with disease and its treatment. Fear and uncertainty replaces confidence and self identity. The joys of living are more or less put on hold while living as long as possible is pursued.  

A Time to Live honors whatever life prolonging choices are being made while at the same time suggesting we look at the gifts life offers each day.