Book review – Farewell
I just finished reading the book Farewell by Dr. Ed Creagan (also available at RPL), a Mayo Clinic palliative care doctor whose book is designed to help us all navigate end of life decisions. It’s a topic that makes many uncomfortable, but death in our country has been medicalized (with the attending cost consequences) to the point where many doctors don’t want to die the way their patients do.
This book helps us understand what current medicalized death looks like. It lays out what the alternatives are, and who are the resources to get connected to so you can get access to those resources. It gives lists of questions to consider, and statements to make to care providers when you have needs they aren’t offering to solve. And it can act as a broker of this unpopular of discussion topics.
This book also had a long list of other recommended books for specific related but non-identical topics. I’d already read a couple, but there were many I hadn’t yet heard of. So now of course I’ve topped back off my hold list at the Rochester Public Library.
I like to have data up front. Way up front. I want to know what my options are, and have time to put effort in place if that’s what it takes to steer options so the results are the ones I prefer. I’ve got a nonagenarian grandmother, octogenarian in-laws, and septuagenarian parents. This book did a great job of putting the important things out in front, to the point where I plan to send copies of this book to my siblings and my parents. I can’t exactly call them Christmas presents, but at the same time anything that helps us all get onto the same page, hopefully far enough in advance that we’re having more of an intellectual discussion rather than the stereotypical screaming match about “you killed mom!” after a DNR order, might be the best present ever. And given how many of us are fallback medical decision makers for the others (as is the case in many families), after we’ve all had a chance to read it we can have a really high level discussion not just about the parents, but about each other’s goals for treatment and care.
The only downside on this book in my opinion was its disjointedness and simultaneous overlap between chapters. But that’s actually likely inevitable, given that one of the specific goals of the author was to make each chapter stand-alone so that a reader in need (overwhelmed, out of time, or both) could skip to just the section they needed.
I don’t do a book review on nearly all of the books I read (~8 book reviews a month would be too many, I think, and only about 3 a month are financial planning related books), but I try to pick out the ones that will provide the most value to you my readers.