I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I’d settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice. If wishes were horses, wouldn’t we all love to ride through the desert of life to the oasis of immortality?.
Its not everyday you wake up and decide, “You know what…Today! i am going to think about death”. As an immortal, I have the luxury of imagination…sigh -:))
But keeping with the spirits of Halloween. Its no surprise i finally finished this book in November.
Being Mortal is a sobering, calming and quite a reassuring book, to deal with the inevitable; looking at trends in the impact of how we use all available means to keep people alive, and how that affects someone’s final days.
Gawande chronicles and relives his medical experiences through the pages from encounters in nursing homes with the elderly, terminally ill patients undergoing chemotherapy, ICU patients to facing his own fathers demise,
Being Mortal is a book about asking the difficult questions in the era of modern medicine; were nursing homes have become jails we send people to for the crime of being old.
In a time when hospitals have become experimental labs administering concoctions and contraptions to the living cadaver of the terminally ill. One is left to ask:-
“Where is your “line in the sand” when it comes to deciding how you want to live in your last weeks and months?” When is the right time to stop treatment? How much is too much? When is the right time to die? “What are your goals?” (eye roll) In the face of our demise, most people do not want to suffer but few have defined what “suffering” means for them.
The most important take away for me was the fact that, If we can help the dying/terminally ill/elderly choose the way they live & depart till the end, then the realization that they will not live forever, will not have as a profound impact as it does on some people. The ultimate goal after all, is not a good death, but a good life – all the way to very end.
Having lost a couple of people in the 30 yrs of my ordinary existence all in hospitals, the last being my dad, the book left me thinking a lot, what a difference it would have made to their final days if it was addressed to them that they were dying and allowed to choose what mattered to them.
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