Five Stars

“A colleague once told her, Wilson said, ‘We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love.’ That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail.”

The above quote sums up beautifully much of what Dr. Gawande discusses in this really lovely, interesting and motivating book. Being Mortal focuses on how modern medicine has failed us in that it can keep people alive much longer than it used to, but often at a very serious cost. His focus is primarily on the elderly, but he also includes the seriously, terminally ill in this exploration.

Think about the above quote. We all want to do what we want – to have the freedom to decide when we will get up in the morning, what we will eat, and who we will spend time with. But, when it comes to our loved ones, it seems that so often what we most want is for them to be safe. It is that concern that has led us to do things like put people into nursing homes to keep them safe from falls, even though they are much more miserable. As long as they are safe, that’s all that matters. But Dr. Gawande makes the very compelling argument that the safety isn’t the primary concern, or shouldn’t be. Allowing people to live meaningful lives, whatever the person’s own definition, should be our concern as people age or experience the end stages of a terminal illness.

The book does a great job of illustrating how doctors really shy away from having the frank conversations with their seriously ill patients. They provide information, but that information is often based on what to do to lengthen life, not improve the quality of it. Taking a page from the palliative care / hospice movement, Dr. Gawande advocates for asking the hard questions, like what do the patients fear most, what is the quality of life they’d be willing to tolerate, and similar questions, to really get at the heart of their concern.

Dr. Gawande also looks at how, especially with the elderly, we focus too much on keeping them safe as opposed to happy. He provides the back story on the nation’s first true assisted living facility, where residents were allowed to do things like lock their doors. Yes, they might fall, but the staff was dedicated to providing whatever support services were necessary to allow these residents to keep as much independence as possible. It is amazing when you really think about how much we focus on things like fall prevention (which is important, obviously), but not on really figuring out ways to prevent the falls WHILE allowing people access to the things in their lives that matter, like deciding when to get out of bed in the morning.

I strongly recommend this book, especially for those who have parents who are elderly, or for those who care about the quality of life of seriously ill people. It asks us to reframe our thinking, and really consider what it is that we value, and how we would want others to take that into consideration as we got older or sicker.

And with that, I complete my second Cannonball Read.

Five Stars

Last year I reviewed a book about a forensic anthropologist, where I mentioned I do work related to death. It is one part of what I do, and (at least for now) has never actually involved me providing after-death care, or even arranging for it. It’s a possibility, though. And it is a field that I find unendingly interesting.

I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but I’d like to say thank you. Its premise is one young woman’s experience working in a crematory. Most of the book – I’d say maybe 70% – involves stories from her time there, seamlessly woven with interesting notes about how different cultures have handled death of the millennia. She does a really fantastic job at this, especially since this is her first book. The book takes a bit of a shift towards the dark about three-quarters of the way through (I know, how much darker can it get? It’s a book about death! But it does), but it finishes up nicely.

Ms. Doughty’s book points out all of the ways that we have turned death into something to be hidden and feared. This is a relatively new construction – at least the hidden part. Many cultures have feared death forever, and some have just seen it as a way of life. Ms. Doughty, while a part of the death care industry, learns through her experiences that she wants to provide a different way of understanding and recognizing death. I’ve not yet read any of her blog posts (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/) but I plan to, because I find her perspective interesting.

I bought this book at 1 P.M. today; I’m writing the review just before 6 P.M. I literally only put the book down to use the bathroom and to fold some laundry. That’s it. And at 240 pages, it’s not a short book. But it’s an interesting one, and one that I think has value not just for those who find the death care industry interesting, but for those who think that maybe there’s something missing from how we handle death in the U.S.

Four Stars

I found this book at this local store called Watson Kennedy, which is the kind of store I could easily spend hours in. It’s the kind of place where everything costs just a little more than it probably should, and where items are organized by color instead of type. It’s the kind of place that sells several kinds of olive oils as well as antique etiquette books. Anyway, the reason I share this is because it’s also the kind of store that leads people to buy books they really don’t need.

This is just such a book, but it was actually a joy to read. It’s a coffee-table-type book filled with lovely illustrations and tips for decorating your home. The tips are great, and only a little ridiculous at times. It’s a well-written and useful book (hence the four star rating), and I found it inspirational. The only problems are that a) I don’t really have a budget to start adding things to our house (although my husband and I both dream of a new couch, and maybe a coffee table that isn’t a $19 shoe rack from Target) and b) we rent our apartment. So a lot of the suggestions – especially ones involving painting walls or hanging a lot of items on the wall – just aren’t practical for us right now.

However! Someday we will figure out a way to buy a place, and at that point I will pull this book out again and look it over. The suggestions about lighting were especially great, which is a sentence that really makes me feel like an adult. I don’t think 13-year-old me would think that I’d enjoy a book with a lot of talk about lamps, and yet I did. If you are lucky enough to be about to buy a house, or trying to figure out ways to decorate your home, I think this is a nice book to pick up.