“Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is a physician with significant gifts. He’s a competent medical practitioner. He’s able and willing to observe himself and his colleagues in a way divested of the ego many doctors can’t quell. And he can write. This combination made me stick with, finish, and enjoy a book crammed with history, research, and facts—not my preferred reading fare.

Gawande held my interest by telling stories about people’s journeys at the end of their lives, including his own father’s death from cancer. Gawande’s father became his best teacher as he struggled with balancing his wishes and expectations with the realities dictated by his disease. He and other beautifully depicted patients showed Gawande the importance of honoring the dying, of giving them choices, of valuing quality of life over quantity, and of telling the truth, even if that truth means that medical treatment is not the answer.

BEING MORTAL does not provide cheap, simple answers. It explores the dying process with courage and honesty, the stance Gawande believes doctors should take with their patients. It invites us to step up to the plate when our loved ones are dying by examining our own beliefs and fears. And it takes us inside the mind of a man determined to make the end of life as satisfying as possible.

I was aware, as I read BEING MORTAL, that I’m an old lady now, and I was a little creeped out. A line from a song kept running through my head. Country Joe and the Fish belting out, “Ain’t no time to wonder why. Whoopee, we’re all goin to die! Whoopee, we’re all goin to die!” Yikes.

But, creeped out or not, I absorbed BEING MORTAL because it is, overall, about hope. Hope that doctors, nurses, hospice heads, and family members can learn to accept the inevitabilities of the life and death cycles. Hope of enabling well-being rather than ensuring survival. Hope that, when, Whoopie, it’s my time to die, I can do it as well as possible and on my terms. That, Gawande insists, is what matters in the bittersweet end.

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