End-of-Life Reading List
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
A practicing surgeon addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation
When Breath Becomes Air
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life…
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
An exquisite memoir about how to live–and love–every day…
On Living
As a hospice chaplain, Kerry Egan didn’t offer sermons or prayers, unless they were requested; in fact, she found, the dying rarely want to talk about God, at least not overtly. Instead, she discovered she’d been granted an invaluable chance to…
A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
“There is nothing wrong with you for dying,” hospice physician B.J. Miller and journalist and caregiver Shoshana Berger write…
The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
The Art of Dying Well is about living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and…
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved
Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke, and had finally had a…
No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear
Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered…
The Private Worlds of Dying Children
The death of a child, writes Myra Bluebond-Langner, poignantly underlines the impact of social and cultural factors on the way that…
Tuesday’s With Morrie
The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where…
The Book of Two Ways
Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight…
Between Two Kingdoms
It started with an itch – first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible…
In Love
This powerful memoir by New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom is an illuminating story of two people whose love leads them to find a courageous…
The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After
“Julie Yip-Williams lived a life defined by effort and…
Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
Extreme Measures charts Zitter’s journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming…
A Heart that Works
A Heart That Works is Delaney’s intimate, unflinching, and fiercely funny exploration of what happened – from the harrowing illness to the vivid, bodily impact of grief and the blind, furious rage that followed through to the forceful, unstoppable love that…
On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families
One of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century, On Death and Dying grew…
Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living
Personal Effects is an unsparing, up-close look at the difficult work Jensen does behind the yellow tape and the lessons he learned…