Books

We wish everyone would read this book, regardless of age, health, or faith. Ostaseski’s stories from years of hospice work as well as reflections from his own life are poignant and inspirational. He offers ways to live with uncertainty and find joy, peace, and acceptance at any time in our lives.

“A common sense path to define what a ‘good’ death looks like” (USA TODAY), The Art of Dying Well is about living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life (even […]

“We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for our loved ones.” This insight, among many more in this important book, has helped countless people begin to think about the loss of loved ones as well as their own mortality. Through many stories, Gawande stresses the importance of honest conversations.

This book, writes NH Options ally Charles Felton, discusses the problems and various practical aspects navigating Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. The author is a research anthropologist at the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina. She interviewed patients, caregivers, activists, healthcare providers, and legislators. It’s an important contribution for everyone working on legalizing medical aid in dying – and especially for us next door in New Hampshire. There’s a link to the author discussing her work: Watch here.

With humor, fine storytelling, compassion, and insight, Richmond reflects on the aging process, including his own, from his view as a Buddhist teacher.

Joan Halifax, a leading Buddhist teacher and thinker, has spent years working with dying people, their loved ones, and caregivers. This book offers practical advise, profound insight, and wisdom about the transformative power of the dying process.

We wish every physician, every terminal patient, and every future terminal patient would read this book. Zitter is an ICU and palliative care physician, a great story teller, and a much needed voice of reason regarding end of life care. She takes the reader inside the ICU, bedside with patients facing grave decisions, family consultations, and the sometimes complicated dynamics within the medical team and within individual physicians, especially herself.

Creagan is a cancer specialist and first board certified palliative care and hospice physician at the Mayo Clinic. He covers emotional and medical aspects of dying, including considerations for advance directives.

“Everyone should receive candid information and medicine’s respectful deference to their beliefs and values,” write Lee, who has spent over half a century in health care and patient advocacy. Her book is intended to empower people to make the best decisions for themselves as illness advances and death approaches.

Written by hospice nurses who share indelible stories from their years of being at the bedsides of dying people. It’s wonderfully approachable, written with deep compassion and insight.

Bloom’s powerful, poignant, and deeply humane story of her husband’s living with early onset Alzheimer’s – and his choice to end his life. Bloom, a noted novelist, is also a therapist. With sometimes painful honesty, she describes their journey of sorrow, anger, confusion, frustration, joy, beauty, and deep love. Their story begs the question, why should Americans have to travel to Switzerland to take control of their own deaths?

Butler’s account of the decline and death of her father is harrowing, instructive, and a call to action. “Before I shepherded my parents through to their deaths, I thought that medical overtreatment was mainly an economic problem,” Butler writes. “After my father's death, I understood the human cost. After my mother's death, I saw that there could be another path.”