The Good Death: A Guide for Supporting Your Loved One Through the End of Life

O’Brien draws on her work as a hospice nurse and death doula in her compassionate debut guide to end-of-life care. Exploring modern discomfort with death, she argues that scientific advances have “medicalized” dying, eroding its humanity as patients are funneled through a health system that “keeps people breathing at all costs” without accounting for their quality of life or discussing what to expect at the end. She unpacks how best to navigate that system by detailing the stages of common end-of-life diseases like lung cancer, how to interpret pain cues to keep the patient comfortable, and how to help them formulate advance directives. More broadly, she advises readers on how to assist the dying person in sorting through weighty emotions, reviewing financial arrangements for the funeral, and drawing up a will. Such advice is worthwhile, and O'Brien's anecdotes about caring for the dying are reassuring, even if she stumbles into generalizations in a less helpful chapter on how spirituality manifests at the end of life. Still, caregivers seeking practical and emotional support will find plenty of value. (Mar.)