Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life [Hardcover]

MD, Ira Byock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 1997

A doctor who specializes in caring for the dying recounts the stories of his patients and their families in order to illustrate how good medicine can help people face death, resolve conflicts, and facilitate death with clarity and peace.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On his deathbed, faced with creditors and unpaid bills, Oscar Wilde said despairingly, "I am dying beyond my means!" If only the poor, beleaguered genius had read this book! None of us gets out of here alive, but reading this book will lessen your fear of the ultimate end and give you some guidance about enjoying your life to the fullest right up until your final moment. Do people really enjoy life in the face of death? People do. The stories of individuals in Dr. Byock's book will move and inspire you to change your feelings about the end of your life, and also your feelings about your life in the present.

From Publishers Weekly

This study of how to die well displays uncommon vitality. Byock, president elect of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Care, is a gifted storyteller. Beginning with his own father's terminal illness, he details without scientific cant the process of decline that awaits most of us. The case studies, which form the humanistic soul of this work, never devolve into the maudlin or saccharine. Life on the edge of the great crossing is explored in all its sadness and pathos, but Byock also makes room for wisdom, hope and even the joy of final understanding. By recounting the passages of patients in his Missoula, Mont., practice, Byock makes a forceful case for hospice care and against physician-assisted suicide. He demonstrates how the physical pain and emotional despair of the dying may be handled. The family constellation of the terminally ill is also analyzed, with emphasis on a hospice's ability, through its doctors, nurses, psychologists and social workers, to help those left behind. Not only is this book informative, especially the question-and-answer section at the end, it is also insightful. Readers will sense Byock's personal growth as his understanding of final issues flowers through a 20-year specialization. Byock recalls his growth from a callow resident to a concerned son and, finally, to a healer with a mission. Whether it's the middle-aged mother who must resolve disillusionment with her sister, the bitter father of three who achieves serenity or the gutsy teenage girl with a rare genetic disease, the people whose sojourns Byock recounts receive from him the dignity they merit. German rights to Kinder Verlag; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 299 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; large type edition edition (January 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573220515
• ISBN-13: 978-1573220514
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #341,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

126 of 128 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comforting the Dying, Enriching the Living, July 26, 2000

By 

[e-mail] - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dying Well (Paperback)

This book is one of those rare works that combines passionate engagement with a universal issue, artful storytelling, and clinical expertise. The author allows each of the patients he describes to bless him, and thereby to bless the reader. Dying, the author argues, is not simply a holding pattern between life and death. It is a vital developmental time that holds infinite possiblities for deepening, learning to love, serving one another both as caregiver and receiver of care, and simply learning to "be" after what often has been a lifetime of mechanistic "doing." Such possibility is created when simple principles of Hospice are honored. Pain must be absolutely controlled. The patient (and the family) must be tenderly companioned. Such care, the author convinces us, is a privilege, a holy time in which human beings gather together in the face of Mystery in all of its agony and joy and wonder and transcendent meaning. We can only create human community, the author suggests, when we are willing to simultaneously look death in the face and to remain open to the gift of healing. I closed the book more alive, more thankful, less fearful, and more curious about the prospect of the adventures ahead.

81 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Helped me when I needed it, February 16, 2000

By 

J. Dietsch - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dying Well (Paperback)

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.

63 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dignity and Care, December 7, 2005

By 

Kirie Pedersen "Kirie Pedersen" (Brinnon, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dying Well (Paperback)

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.