Final acts : death, dying, and the choices we make / edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Donna Perry.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Maglin, Nan Bauer.

Perry, Donna Marie, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Death.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (339 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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:

Notes on my dying / Ruthann Robson

Live longer or live better? / June Bingham

"Life which is ours to know just once" / Nancy Barnes

Caregiving Beulah: a relentless challenge / Susan Perlstein

E-mails to family and friends: Claude and maxilla-declining gently / Sara M. Evans

Whose death is it, anyway? / Carol K. Oyster

The family tree / Jean Levitan

Elegy for an optimist / Mimi Schwartz

Buddhist reflections on life and death: a personal memoir / Alan Pope

Death as my colleague / Mary Jumbelic

The transformation of death in America / Stephen P. Kiernan

Unintended consequences: hospice, hospitals, and the not-so-good death / Kathryn Temple

The hospital ethics committee: solving medical dilemmas / Natalie R. Hannon

Ethical principles for end-of-life decision making / Candace Cummins Gauthier

Life or death: who gets to choose? / Cherylynn MacGregor

Empowering patients at the end of life: law, advocacy, policy / Kathryn L. Tucker

Dying down under: from law reform to the peaceful pill / Philip Nitschke, Fiona Stewart

Ageism and late-life choices / Margaret Cruikshank

Physician-assisted suicide: why both sides are wrong / Ira Byock

End of days / Marge Piercy.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-280-49246-5

9786613587695

0-8135-4908-6

OCLC:

1129179016