With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

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And secondly, Mannix and all of the wider NHS staff that we meet along the way are nearly all calm and happy and lovely. By turns touching and tragic, funny and wise, With the End in Mind brings together Kathryn Mannix ' s lifetime of medical experience to tell powerful stories of life and death. I have referred to that one a number of times when talking to people who were in fear of their death, and I can see how this one would be even more comforting. The narratives feel generic; the people often feel generic, as though all their idiosyncrasies have been sanded down or air-brushed out. In previous centuries, death was familiar and not hidden behind institutional walls: before the 20th century, there would have been scarcely an adult who had not seen their parents, some of their children, and their friends die.

There were lots of peoples problems 'solved' here - rather than empowerment so that individuals and their families could be supported in choosing their own ways forward. Skulls used as flowerpots, bodies made into compost on a body farm, corpses covered with rose petals, funerals conducted by men with dreadlocks and purple frock coats – what Doughty relishes are those rituals that acknowledge death, its bodily fact and its emotional enormity. I found this book through a caring and compassionate recommendation at just the right time - and I pass it on in the same spirit.Many of us won’t read a book like this because we don’t want to look at death, think about death, speak about death, let alone read about Mr Grim and his rusty scythe. But there are also things that irritated me and make me question elements of the narrative, which of course make me question it all. I also salute the brave and dignified men and women who’s stories you have sensitively jumbled and then shared with us. Mannix shows an incredible devotion and subtility towards human feelings and choices, but in this one chapter she generalizes one case and by doing so makes a faux pas. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

I could have done with more exploration of what death means to people of faith for the foundation of the Hospice movement was distinctly Christian. I tried to read it from a dual perspective, as a professional and academic in this field but also as a person inquisitive about their own death and those of my loved ones. She has a particular interest in combining CBT with palliative care to help the dying approach their remaining time with realism rather than pessimism.This book contains a lot of personal stories, all different in the same way that we are all different people.

No es más que una colección de historias diversas sobre un montón de gente que vivió sus últimos días. Meanwhile, the author tells some of her own stories and encourages the reader to think about issues of their own. Having qualified as a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist in 1993, she started the UK’s (possibly the world’s) first CBT clinic exclusively for palliative care patients, and devised ‘CBT First Aid’ training to enable palliative care colleagues to add new skills to their repertoire for helping patients.I almost stopped reading With the End in Mind after 'Please Release Me: B Side' where Mannix tells a story about one man's unpleasant experience in the Netherlands that is entirely based on hearsay, and I realised that a number of stories she had been telling in that section had been deliberately engineered to emphasise the benefits of palliative care as opposed to euthanasia.