Visualizing End of Life Issues
RESOURCES – BOOKS
A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
BJ Miller & Shoshana Berger
"A practical guide to living your best life for as long as possible, while making it easier for your loved ones after your death."
Advice For Future Corpses
Sallie Tisdale
"A compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes and stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world."
African American Grief: A series in Death, Dying and Bereavement
Paul C. Rosenblatt and Beverly R. Wallace
"Based on interviews with 26 African-Americans who have faced the death of a significant person in their lives, the authors document, describe, and analyze key phenomena of the unique African-American experience of grief. The book combines moving narratives from the interviewees with sound research, analysis, and theoretical discussion of important issues in thanatology as well as topics such as the influence of the African-American church, gospel music, family grief, medical racism as a cause of death, and discrimination during life and after death."
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Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matty Weingast
"How do we think about death? How do we think about the dying? What’s the current state of palliative and end-of-life health care, and how can we improve it? And how do we give care without becoming emotionally and spiritually depleted? In Awake at the Bedside, pioneers of palliative and end-of-life care — as well as doctors, Dharma teachers, chaplains, poets, and caregivers of all kinds — offer insights on incredibly challenging questions like these."
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande
"In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures – in his own practices as well as others’ – as life draws to a close. And he discovers how we can do better. He follows a hospice nurse on her rounds, a geriatrician in his clinic, and reformers turning nursing homes upside down. He finds people who show us how to have the hard conversations and how to ensure we never sacrifice what people really care about."
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Dying Made Easy(er): Creating your Happy Ending
Myra Bennett
"A practical guide through estate planning, hospice, and grieving by an end-of-life doula."
Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind
Barbara Becker
"When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With life-affirming prose, Becker helps us see that that grief is not a problem to be solved, but rather a sacred invitation – an opportunity to let go into something even greater… a love that will inform all the days of our lives."
How To Carry What Can't Be Fixed: A Journal for Grief
Megan Devine
It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
Megan Devine
Making Friends With Death: A Field Guide for Your Impending Last Breath (To Be Read, Ideally, Before It's Imminent!)
Laura Pritchett
One Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if it Were Your Last
Stephen Levine
"In his new book, Stephen Levine, author of the perennial best-seller Who Dies?, teaches us how to live each moment, each hour, each day mindfully – as if it were all that was left. On his deathbed, Socrates exhorted his followers to practice dying as the highest form of wisdom. Levine decided to live this way himself for a whole year, and now he shares with us how such immediacy radically changes our view of the world and forces us to examine our priorities."
Opening to Grief: Finding your Way from Loss to Peace
Claire B. Willis
Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity
Michael Marmot
There's More To Dying Than Death: A Buddhist Perspective
Lama Shenpen Hookham
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The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sogyal Rinpoche
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"A newly revised and updated 25th Anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling spiritual classic, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, is the ultimate introduction to Tibetan Buddhist wisdom. An enlightening, inspiring, and comforting manual for life and death.”
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The Top 5 Regrets Of The Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing
Bonnie Ware
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The Wilder Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Francis Weller
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"Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it."
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Mitch Albon
"A professor's former student visits him weekly after his terminal ALS diagnosis and discovers a beauty in living—and dying."
Who Will Cry When You Die? Life Lessons from the Monk who Sold his Ferrari
Robin Sharma
Without Compassion there is no Healthcare: Leading with Care in a Technological Age
Brian Hodges, Gail Peach, Jocelyn Bennett
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The following books are required and suggested texts for University of Chicago course KNOW 37015:Death Panels – Exploring Dying and Death through Comics, taught by Brian Callender, MD and MK Czerwiec, RN.
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The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
Katy Butler
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Dying Well
Ira Byock
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Speaking for the Dying: Life and Death Decisions in Intensive Care
Susan B. Shapiro
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LGBT-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice
Kimberly D. Acquaviva
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Tying Rocks to Clouds: Meetings and Conversations with Wise and Spiritual People
William Elliot
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The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker
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From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Caitlin Doughty and Landis Blair
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
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When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
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The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Nina Riggs
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How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (Rev. Edn.)
Sherwin B. Nuland
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Life Support: Invitation to Prayer
Judith Cohen Margolis
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Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age
Dave Lewis
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The Fall of Freddy the Leaf: A Story of Life for All Ages
Leo Buscaglia
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