Shortly afterwards Thomas began to write. This book is the result.Beginning on the day of Kadian's death, and continuing to the year anniversary, and beyond, Kadian Journal is a record of grief in its rawest form, and of a mind in shock and questioning a strange new reality. Interspersed within the journal are fragments of memory: jewel-bright everyday moments that slowly combine to form a biography of a lost son, and a lost life.It is an extraordinary document, and several things at once: a lucid, raw, and startlingly brave book: a powerful and moving account of a father's grief, and a beautiful tribute to an exceptional son.

    And though we are rewarded with more time with the people we love, we are also faced with new sets of complications—more diseases, more disability, more need for support and careful judgments. Yet while our health care system may help people live to an older age, it doesn't perform so well when decline eventually sets in. We want to do the best thing but are overwhelmed with the staggering choices we face.Geriatrician Dennis McCullough has spent his life helping families to cope with their parents' aging and eventual final passage, experiences he faced with his own mother. In this comforting and much-needed book, he recommends a new approach, which he terms "Slow Medicine."Shaped by common sense and kindness, grounded in traditional medicine yet receptive to alternative therapies, Slow Medicine advocates for careful anticipatory "attending" to an elder's changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—an approach that improves the quality of elders' extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. As Dr. McCullough argues, we need to learn that time and kindness are sometimes more important and humane at these late stages than state-of-the-art medical interventions.My Mother, Your Mother will help you learn how to:—form an early and strong partnership with your parents and siblings;—strategize on connecting with doctors and other care providers;—navigate medical crises;—create a committed Advocacy Team;—reach out with greater empathy and awareness; and—face the end-of-life time with confidence and skill.Although taking care of those who have always cared for us is not an easily navigated time of life, My Mother, Your Mother will help you and your family to prepare for this complex journey. This is not a plan for getting ready to die; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years. And the time to start is now.

    First published a decade ago, it is still the book that motherless daughters of all ages look to for understanding and comfort and that they press into each other's hands. Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss survivors, this life-affirming book is now newly expanded to reflect the author's personal experience with the continued legacy of mother loss; now married and a mother of young children herself, Edelman better understands how the effects of mother loss change over time and in light of new relationships. A work of stunning courage and honesty, Motherless Daughters is a must read for the millions of women whose mothers have gone, but whose need for healing, mourning, and mothering remains. It is a timeless classic.

    Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.

    Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn't mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of.Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married, Joyce resolved that no one could alter her course of determined independence. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the nineteen months that followed, as they battled his illness together, she discovered for the first time what it really meant to be a couple--to be a true partner and to have one.This is their story. Charting the course through their whirlwind romance, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and Joyce's return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.

    With extensive treatment of the heart of epidemiology-from study designs to descriptive epidemiology to quantitative measures-this reader-friendly text is accessible and interesting to a wide range of beginning students in all health-related disciplines. A unique focus is given to real-world applications of epidemiology and the development of skills that students can apply in subsequent course work and in the field. The text is also accompanied by a complete package of instructor and student resources available through a companion Web site.

    He enjoyed a successful career and drew happiness from his wife, children, family and close friends. Then in May 2005, Gene was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer. This is his account of his final journey.

    Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and to illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. The book is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a rumination on death, dying and the mystery that awaits us all.Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a buildup of thematic resonances. In the process of thinking deeply about death, Joseph finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote this book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrendous.Replete with literary allusions and references ranging from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D.H. Lawrence and Voltaire, among many other literary voices, the result is an absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with death.

    Grief Journey

    By examining the work produced by writers at the end of their lives, it elucidates the difference between growing old and disintegrating.

    Learn what emotions and thoughts might come next, and how long you might expect to wait until things return to normal. The important thing to understand is that the death of a parent affects everybody differently, but there are some commonalities shared by people with similar experiences or circumstances. Whether your relationship was beautiful, fraught with conflict, or distant- this book has been written to help you, like countless people before you, understand the inevitable loss of a parent at some point during your lifetime. Here Is A Preview of What You’ll Learn… How the end of a lifelong relationship may affect you Understanding the complex emotions of grief Unexpected thoughts and buried feelings Family dynamics and how these may change Regrets and difficult relationships How young adults may not be equipped to come to terms with the loss of a parent Strategies to heal yourself Strategies to heal your family Much more… Download your copy today

    In desperate attempts to cure their patients, physicians injected them with deadly medications, cut holes in their heads, and sterilized them. Years of insufficient funding caused the hospital to decay into a crumbling facility with too few staff, as seen in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Today, after a $360 million makeover, Oregon State Hospital is a modern treatment hospital for the state's civil and forensic mentally ill. In this compelling account of the institution's tragedies and triumphs, author Diane Goeres-Gardner offers an unparalleled look at the very human story of Oregon's historic asylum.

    One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

    Filled with strange anecdotes and illustrated with many bizarre and ghoulish images, Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears records the lengths to which people throughout history have gone to cope with the five principle fears regarding death: the fear of being buried alive; of our body being defiled in the grave; of disintegrating; of being forgotten; and of suffering an ignominious death. Here you can read about: The case of Lavrinia Merli, who died of hysterics. Two days after burial she was discovered turned over in her grave, having given birth to a seven month old baby. The various methods of embalming, including the Egyptian, and a step-by-step account of modern embalming. The horrifying slow and painful ending of Robert Francois Damiens, who was tortured to death after attempting to assassinate King Louis XV.

    Sam Parnia faces death every day. Through his work as a critical-care doctor in a hospital emergency room, he became very interested in some of his patients’ accounts of the experiences that they had while clinically dead. He started to collect these stories and read all the latest research on the subject, and then he decided to conduct his own experiments. That work has culminated in this extraordinary book, which picks up where Raymond Moody’s &I left off.           Written in a scientific, balanced, and engaging style, this is powerful and compelling reading.This fascinating and controversial book will change the way you look at death and dying. . . .