Full Description
Today most people die gradually, from incremental illnesses, rather than from the heart attacks or fast-moving diseases that killed earlier generations. Given this new reality, the essays in Final Acts explore how we can make informed and caring end-of-life choices for ourselves and for those we loveùand what can happen without such planning.Contributors include patients, caretakers, physicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers, educators, hospital administrators, academics, psychologists, and a poet, and among them are ethicists, religious believers, and nonbelievers. Some write moving, personal accounts of "good" or 'bad" deaths; others examine the ethical, social, and political implications of slow dying. Essays consider death from natural causes, suicide, and aid-in-dying (assisted suicide).
Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying, treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends, caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government.
For those who yearn for some measure of control over death, the essayists in Final Acts, from very different backgrounds and with different personal and professional experiences around death and dying, offer insight and hope.
Contents
Part I: Death and the Family
Ruthann Robson, Notes on My Dying
June Bingham, Live Better or Longer?
Nancy Barnes, "Life which is ours to know just once"
Susan Perlstein, Caregiving Beulah
Sara M. Evans, E-mails to Family and Friends
Carol K. Oyster, Whose Death Is It, Anyway?
Jean Levitan, The Family Tree
Mimi Schwartz, Elegy for an Optimist
Alan Pope, Buddhist Reflections on Life and Death
Mary Jumbelicm, Death as My Colleague
Part II: Perspectives on Death and Dying
Stephen P. Kiernan, The Transformation of Death in America
Kathryn Temple, Unintended Consequences
Natalie R. Hannon, The Ethics Committee
Candace Cummins Gauthier, Ethical Principles for End-of Life Decision Making
Cherylynn MacGregor, Life or Death
Kathryn L. Tucker, Empowering Patients at the End of Life
Philip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart, Dying Down Under
Margaret Cruikshank, Ageism As It Affects Late-Life Choices
Ira Byock,Physician-Assisted Suicide
Marge Piercy, End of days
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