Death & Dying
Coming to terms with death is not an easy journey. Here you will find some resources that explore the impact that death has on everyone.
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Tuesdays with Morrie - by Mitch Albom
“The titular Morrie was Morrie Schwartz, Albom's university professor 20 years before the events being narrated. An accidental viewing of an interview with Morrie on Nightline led Albom to become reunited with his old teacher, friend, and "coach" at a time when Albom, a successful sportswriter, was struggling to define dissatisfactions with his own life and career. Morrie, on the other hand, after a rich life filled with friends, family, teaching, and music, was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease, a crippling illness that diminished his activities daily. Albom was one of hundreds of former students and acquaintances who traveled great distances to visit Morrie in the final months of his life.” - Brenda Pittsley
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A Good Death: Making the most of our Final Choices - by Sandra Martin
In this deeply moving talk, Lucy Kalanithi reflects on life and purpose, sharing the story of her late husband, Paul, a young neurosurgeon who turned to writing after his terminal cancer diagnosis. "Engaging in the full range of experience -- living and dying, love and loss -- is what we get to do," Kalanithi says. "Being human doesn't happen despite suffering -- it happens within it."
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Dying and Death in Canada - by H.C. Northcott & D.M. Wilson
“Dying and Death in Canada offers a comprehensive, up-to-date examination of dying, death, and bereavement from a Canadian perspective. The third edition includes two new chapters that highlight trends and provide assessments of end-of-life care in Canada. Several new topics are covered, including assisted death, emerging trends in funerary practices and memorialization, and changing conceptualizations and interventions in the grieving process.” - Amazon.ca
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On Death and Dying - by E. Kübler-Ross & I. Byock
“One of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century, On Death and Dying grew out of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this remarkable book, Dr. Kübler-Ross first explored the now-famous five stages of death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Through sample interviews and conversations, she gives readers a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, the professionals who serve that patient, and the patient's family, bringing hope to all who are involved.” - Amazon.ca
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - by Atul Gawande
"Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. And families go along with all of it." - Amazon.ca
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When Breath Becomes Air - by Paul Kalanithi & Abraham Verghese
"At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. 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." - Amazon.ca
Learn about the impact death can have on you and on your family from psychologist, Dr. Robert Firestone. This source lists the different levels of coping and understanding that people go through depending on how connected they were to the person who passed away.
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