Karen's Reviews > Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Catching up…

It was December 2016 when our Library Book Discussion group decided to read and discuss this book. It seemed appropriate at the time. A lot of us were dealing with either aging parents, or our own feelings about death and dying. His focus was on assisted living. I was caregiving my mother, and my husband was caregiving his father in the same assisted living environment. So, this discussion and book was very personal for me, at the time.

My Mom and father-in-law have since passed on. (Interestingly, within two weeks of each other.) But I remember how helpful this book was for me, and the group of men and women who surrounded me in discussion that day.

We shared how to distill what mattered most to each of us in life so that we could navigate our way toward the edge in a meaningful and satisfying way.

I won’t go into the various stories that he shares about the different people through his pages, I think that is best read by readers, but he did bring up a variety of heartfelt statements that were meaningful discussion moments for us as a group. As an example…

“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death.”

In our discussion, we wondered how our family would feel about telling them, “I’m ready to go” or even if we would know how we would feel when we were ready to go. It was that fine line about striking a balance between fear of death and just being ready to let go.

I remember that this wasn’t an easy discussion to have with my mother. Especially as her mind began slipping from the Dementia with Lewy Bodies/Parkinson’s Disease.

One day, my mother shared with me that she was afraid of her own pending death. I tried to calm her. I remember her asking me what stage she was in of Parkinson’s disease. And I tried to explain it to her as sensitively as I could. I found out that after I left, her caregiver called me and said she was in tears, because she thought she was going to die soon. I drove back to her immediately, to calm her again and reassure her that wasn’t the case. I realized then, that this was only the beginning that things were going downhill for her – mind.

So much of our discussion about this book, talked about the various fears and challenges associated about end-of-life. The book asked us to consider…

How can we appreciate, honor, value a life, our well-being to live and die in dignity?

I certainly appreciated the experience of this book in working with my mother through her end-of-life.

The author may not have all the answers in this book, but he definitely opened the conversation.