Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors, and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions.
This is the starting point of Seamus O Mahoney s thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.
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Synopsis
We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of the dying spend their last days in general hospitals and nursing homes, in the care of strangers. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are often robbed of their dignity after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions.
This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahony's book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more exposed, with public figures writing memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of death.
Dying has become medicalized and sanitized, but doctors cannot prescribe a "good death. The Way We Die Now asks us to consider how we have gotten to this age of spiritual poverty and argues that giving up our fantasies of control over death can help restore its significance.