"Wisdom and Insight for Life’s Final Chapter."
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Books can be a profound source of guidance, comfort, and understanding as you navigate end-of-life experiences. This section offers carefully curated recommendations, from practical guides on advanced care planning to heartfelt memoirs and spiritual reflections on life and death. Explore these works to gain new perspectives, deepen your knowledge, and find solace during this transformative time.
What's Your Grief
What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help you Through Any Loss is for people experiencing any type of loss. This book discusses some of the most common grief experiences and breaks down psychological concepts to help you understand your thoughts and emotions. It also shares useful coping tools, and helps the reader reflect on their unique relationship with grief and loss.
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Former NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning writer Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, yet practical perspective on death and dying in Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them). Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank, direct, and compassionate meditation on the inevitable.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is a 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival
A Beginner's Guide to the End
Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death By BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger.
Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief
A highly color-illustrated book that functions on numerous levels to soothe body and mind and help the reader drop into the present moment, underneath intense sensations in the body and turbulent thoughts in the mind associated with pain.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In 2017, Wendy had the honor of being the artist-in-residence at Zen Hospice, a six-bed hospice house in San Francisco. Over the course of a year, she spent many afternoons inside the house. She spoke with people experiencing their last stage of life - learning about their memories, fears, joys and regrets.
"In The Wild Edge of Sorrow
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, author and soul activist Francis Weller, offers a new vision of grief and sorrow. He reveals the hidden vitality in grief, uncovered when the heart welcomes the sorrows of our life and those of the world. When the deeper rhythms of grief are allowed to emerge, we become aware of the intimate connection we share with all things. We are ripened in times of loss, made more human by the rites of grief. Through story, poetry and insightful reflections, Francis offers a meditation on the healing power of grief.
Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss
Grief is a personal journey, never the same for any two people and as unique as your life and your relationships. Although loss is an inevitable part of life, how you approach this fact can make the difference between meaningless pain and the manifestation of understanding and wisdom. This book describes a mindful approach to dealing with grief that can help you make that difference.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world's funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry--especially chemical embalming--and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased.