Dying Well

I ordered a like new book and half the pages are ripped or missing, this book should have been thrown in the trash not sold as "like new"

When I was quite young, with a pre-teen stepdaughter, my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was ill for the duration of my stepdaughter's adolescence. I sought vainly for guidance about caring for a loved one whose life is ebbing slowly away. Nobody ever told me a dying person might be angry or might lash out at those with whom he was most close. Now that I've read Dr. Ira Byock's "Dying Well," I understand. According to Dr. Byock, founding member of one of the most extensive hospice and palliative care groups in the United States, those with serious illnesses may lash out from pain, or from a sense that they have lost their dignity, the ability to *do.* Men and women who have devoted their healthy lives to caring more about others than about themselves feel equally angry and often humiliated. Caregivers and patients alike lack vocabulary for the entirely new language--verbal and non-verbal--of dying. Indeed, it may be a language we don't want to learn any more than the seriously ill person wants to face the unknown ahead. From his decades of hospice and palliative care, Ira Byock selects specific family groups to illuminate responses to illness, pain, and death. He details the attitudes, behaviors, and methods to preserve dignity through accurate assessment of discomfort and pain. He shows us how to listen. "Dying well" provides a narrative and vocabulary to ease our linguistic and emotional awkwardness. Byock's book belongs in every medical and home health care facility, counseling office, and home library.

I'm the kind of person whose eyes start to glaze over if I try to absorb more than a few pages of social science/self help type writing. I was steered to this book when I was helping my mother as she died. I had so little experience with death that I worried about doing the wrong thing. As I read the stories I was drawn in, absorbing each small "message" with each story. One, about a man whose final gift to his family was to allow them to help him as he died, touched me so deeply I read it to my mother in her last days. I wish I'd read this book earlier but I don't think it could ever be too late.

As I was struggling through the final months of my mother's life, I stumbled across this inspired book. At some points it was so brutally honest and raw in its assessment of death and hospice issues that I could barely read on, but I felt compelled to. Byock has a rare and valid perspective that deserves discussion--preferably before you are faced with the imminent death of a loved one.

I first heard Dr. Byock interviewed on the Diane Ream(?sp) show on NPR when his book was just out. I knew I had to read it for myself and I was not disappointed. The way the information about how things can be handled in a supportive respectful way for all of those involved at the end of life is the best written guide for many of the difficult situations out in the real world that I have found. If we would take advantage of this kind of informed material and spread the good news that death and dying are not to be feared but that we can be helped through it to the benefit of our own well-being and at the same time relieving the suffering of those who are in the last stages of this life, the support for "assisted suicide" would be revealed as the feeble sham that it is. Hospice is a poorly understood and underutilized organization which deserves a second look as well as our support both in time and resources. I had to read this book in small "doses" to take it all in and it was well worth the effort! CF

This wonderful book approaches the process of dying using individual case vignets which illustrate the essence of the book: no one need die in pain. Dr. Byock outlines care available to terminal patients, both through hospice and palliative medical options. He addresses the subject with regard to both dying persons and those who love and care for them. One purpose of Dr. Byock's book is stated to be to be an effort to elevate dialogue from that of painful death vs. euthanasia to painful death vs. non-painful death. He shows that, through the specialty of Palliative Medicine, consideration of euthanasia becomes unnecessary. This is the first book I've read (Kubler-Ross, Stephen Levine, etc.) that gives specific information regarding how to assist people in the process of dying by making available physical, emotional and psychic support. Anyone facing death (and aren't we all?) will sleep better knowing that they and they're loved ones can die comfortably with the help of the medical community and hospice. This is a "must have" book for anyone pondering life's end.