Showing titles in Death & Dying

Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the discussion and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well.

What if we didn’t consider death the worst possible outcome? What if we discussed it honestly, embraced end-of-life care and prepared for the end of our lives with hope and acceptance? In this empathetic and knowledgeable guide, TikTok star Julie McFadden – known online as ‘Hospice Nurse Julie’ – shares the valuable lessons she’s learned in her fifteen years as a palliative care nurse.

Coleen Nolan – singer, TV host and agony aunt is known for her warmth, straight-talking and compassion. But her empathy and warmth have been earned the hard way – formed by her own deeply-felt experiences of loss and grief. Written with accessibility, heart and fellow-feeling, this is not a guidebook but a companion, a friendly word in the darkest times, packed with advice, understanding and hope – a book to say you’re not alone.

In A Beginner's Guide to Dying Simon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn't so bad. And for that reason it's also only partly about 'dying'. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.

Fuelled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a detective and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

This unusual and important audiobook is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his 30 years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. And he writes about all the conversations that we, our parents, our children, the medical community, our government and society as a whole should be having.

Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.

Dementia, heart failure and cancer are now the leading causes of death in industrialised nations, where life expectancy is mostly above 80. A century ago, life expectancy was about 50 and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents.

At age thirty-eight, Jonathan Gluck, a new father with a promising journalism career, was shocked to learn he had multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer. He was told he had eighteen months to live. That was more than twenty years ago. Gluck isn’t just something of a medical miracle. He’s also part of a growing population. Thanks to revolutionary medical advances, many cancers and other serious illnesses are no longer death sentences but chronic diseases people can often live with for years.

Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments", A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period.

It happened in an instant. Ed was walking through a park with his friend Stuart when there was a bang, a bright light and then nothing. Ed and Stuart had been hit by a bolt of lightning – 300 million volts, enough to power a city for a day, coursed through their bodies, short-circuiting their hearts. Ed was found first, given life-saving CPR to start his heart again, and he survived and had a second chance. He lives life a little differently now, every day knowing the thin margins that separate life and death.

Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, and a haven after the loss of her father, Catherine Coldstream trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfolds her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, only to find that all is not as it seems behind the Order's closed doors. Cut off from the wider world for decades, the community has managed to evade accountability to any authority beyond itself.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

In March of 1980, college senior Peter Panagore went ice climbing on the world-famous Lower Weeping Wall, along the Ice Fields Parkway in Alberta, Canada. His climbing partner was an experienced ice climber, but Panagore was a novice. On their descent, they became trapped on the side of the mountain. As the sun set, he was overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia. He died on the side of that mountain in 1980. In his minutes on the other side, he experienced hell, forgiveness, and unconditional love.

The Buddhist approach to death can be of great benefit to people of all backgrounds - as has been demonstrated time and again in Joan Halifax's decades of work with the dying and their caregivers. Inspired by traditional Buddhist teachings, her work is a source of wisdom for all those who are charged with a dying person's care, facing their own death, or wishing to explore and contemplate the transformative power of the dying process.

Many years of working with the dying showed the authors that certain lessons come up over and over again. Some of these lessons are enormously difficult to master but even the attempts to understand them can be deeply rewarding. Here, in 14 accessible chapters, from the "Lesson of Love" to the "Lesson of Happiness", the authors reveal the truth about our fears, our hopes, our relationships, and above all, about the grandness of who we really are.

Final Exit is the most famous book on voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. There is unique step-by-step language for the competent adult who is terminally or hopelessly ill to bring their life to a peaceful, non-violent end if they wish. Final Exit outlines the legal complications connected with dying, death, hastened death, euthanasia laws, suicide, living wills, and advance directives. Derek Humphry explores the problems with life insurance, as well as the ethics of double suicide.

The first book that explains how to open to the immensity of living with death—and how participating fully in life is the perfect preparation for whatever may come next. In Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, the Levines provide calm compassion rather than the frightening melodrama of death. A meaningful insight how to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next, be it sorrow or joy, loss or gain, death or a new wonderment at life.

Based partly on the author's experience, partly on her in-depth interviews, and partly on a questionnaire she developed with psychologist Holly Barrett to which almost 600 women responded, Father Loss provides the clearest portrait yet of a very special group of women. As a group, they express their insecurities ("Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to love a man totally...because that would mean I didn't love my father anymore." - Leslie).

Showing how we can avoid the suffering caused by comas, this book reveals the wide variety of conscious states that can arise during comas, both positive and negative, and how accepting the reality of these experiences is crucial not only to the recovery of coma survivors, but also to the field of consciousness and near-death experience (NDE) studies.