Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

This book is about aging, a deadly illness, and death—those things we fear so much that we try not to think about them at all, pushing them to the edge of consciousness. The author of the book, famous American surgeon Atul Gawande, is convinced that hiding your head in the sand is wrong: death is part of life, its natural ending, and it is precisely in that quality—consciously and calmly—that it should be accepted. The trouble is that in modern culture old age and dying are handled by medicine, which treats death as just a procedural failure, a fatal technical glitch. Without trying to understand what is truly important and valuable to a person in the last months, weeks, and days of their life, we heroically “fight to the end,” subjecting terminal patients to new treatments—painful as they are, and just as useless. How can we change this situation? How do we find the right words for loved ones whose life is coming to an end? How can we learn to relate to death properly?