| Title |
Type |
Description |
Tags |
| A Wonderful Life by Cyrus Copeland |
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The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Copeland has compiled 64 memorials to larger-than-life individuals, written by eulogizers who are, in most cases, equally unforgettable. Sad, intimate and even funny, these tributes...are compelling, whether you're a fan of history or just supermarket tabloids." The Boston Globe: "You might not think of eulogies as the same thing as love stories, but here...they most certainly are. This is an extraordinary collection of 64 goodbyes to the famous from the (mostly) famous". |
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| Alison's Gift by Pat Hogan |
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"Alison's Gift is the true story of Alison Sanders' life and death-a story that has touched all of America. This is Alison's story and how her life found its way into millions of homes.
Alison's Gift is the triumph of love over life-ending experience. Along with Alison, meet real-life heroes who live through their greatest fears in a journey of loss, grief, and the rekindling of hope. This story chronicles Alison's life and death, her family's experience and her many legacies.
Alison, a vibrant child, had a mission in life to help others. In unique ways, both seen and unseen, her purpose lives on. Her fearlessness, compassion, and leadership qualities transformed her community in life and have reverberated throughout the country in her death. Alison's life was cut short by an air bag in a low-speed automobile collision. Meet Alison's father: although emotionally scarred by his loss, he starts a one-man crusade, forcing the auto industry to adopt safer air bag systems for our children. |
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| Come Into the Water - a Near Death Experience |
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Book describing a near death experience by drowning in a flood in South Dakota back in the 70s. The link below provides a review and access to the book. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Deathing by Anya Foos-Graber |
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"Deathing" richly illustrates the soul's transition, what follows death, how to prepare, and what to expect. The reader learns how traditional rituals were designed to help the soul in transition and how one can help a loved one at that milestone. I consider both books essential background for anyone who works with the terminally ill. Long herself an adept and teacher of out of body movement, Anya Foos-Graber brings the creativity of a novelist and deep, affirming, personal spiritual insight to this most important of topics. (from a review by Tobey Llop) |
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| Departures by Yojiro Takita |
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When his orchestra disbands, the main character decides to start over and moves back to his small hometown. Desperate for work, he secretly takes a job as a "Nokanshi", a funeral professional who prepares the deceased for burial and entrance into the next life. But while working with the families of the departed, he embarks on a spiritual journey of his own as he finally experiences the joy and wonder of living. |
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| Dying Beautifully by Dave Karpowicz |
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Starting with the diagnosis and ending after the cemetery service, "Dying Beautifully" acts as a guide, providing tools to help transform the dying process from sorrow to celebration. In a "workbook" format to facilitate working the book. |
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| Dying Person's Top Five Regrets |
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Good article in the Guardian - a UK newspaper - on just what the title says. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Dying Wish by Karen vanVuuren |
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Retired surgeon, Michael Miller, is dying of end-stage cancer and is determined to avoid the hospital at all costs. He's researched the dying process and believes that stopping eating and drinking will ease his suffering and result in a peaceful, more natural death. During his fast, Michael suffers neither thirst nor hunger. Buoyed by the legacy of this film, he enjoys a last meal, surrounds himself with art and music, and takes leave of his family. |
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| Erasing Death - NPR Interview with Sam Parnia, MD |
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What happens when we die? Wouldn't we all like to know. We can't bring people back from the dead to tell us — but in some cases, we almost can. Resuscitation medicine is now sometimes capable of reviving people after their heart has stopped beating and their brain has flat-lined; Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor and director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, studies what these people experience in that period after their heart stops and before they're resuscitated. This includes visions such as bright lights and out-of-body experiences. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Getting the Last Laugh on Grim Reaper - article by Leonard Pitts |
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This article explores how humor can assist us in being human during the process of a loved one's death. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Graceful Passages (book & CDs) by Stillwater & Malkin |
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Graceful Passages blends music and the spoken word in a new way that creates a touching and luminous audio experience. Acclaimed worldwide, this beautiful book and two-CD set has helped thousands of people come to terms with loss and death as part of life. Widely used in home, hospice, and palliative-care settings, it opens a way to talk about life and death, forgiveness, and acceptance. Its wisdom guides patients, family members, and caregivers to open to the process of letting go and being in the now. |
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| Griefwalker |
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Griefwalker is an extraordinary portrait of Harvard-trained theologian Stephen Jenkinson, who teaches that death empowers us to live and that we must know grief well in order to appreciate our own lives. Many may find Jenkinson’s belief challenging - that our deaths are not something to be denied or avoided but rather “befriended”. He points out that not every culture fears death as we do. The film carries viewers into the lives of those confronting death, as well as those learning how to help people die well. Combining beautiful imagery of the impermanence of nature and the actuality of dying, Griefwalker weaves an illuminating picture of a remarkable man and leaves us with a deeper understanding of how our deaths could be held as “a prized possession”. |
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| Hard Choices For Loving People - by Hank Dunn |
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This booklet was written to provide guidance to patients and their families who must face the "hard choices" as they receive and participate in healthcare. It looks at questions like "Shall resuscitation be attempted", "Shall artificial nutrition and hydration be utilized?", "Should a nursing home resident or someone ill at home be hospitalized?", "Is it time to shift the treatment goal from cure to hospice or comfort care only?". This is all looked at with a compassionate and loving view, and yet is clear and to-the-point. |
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| Help Me Live - 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know - by Lori Hope |
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We want nothing more than to offer comfort and support, and foster hope. But we don’t always know how—and may feel uncomfortable asking. Following her own treatment for cancer, Lori Hope created a survey for cancer survivors addressing issues they wanted their families, friends, and caregivers to understand. The results of the newly expanded survey are presented with honesty, insight, and humor, and complemented by scores of compelling personal stories from survivors of diverse ages and backgrounds. If you are a caregiver, Help Me Live will help you communicate more effectively and respond more compassionately. And if you are a survivor, it will help you feel validated, empowered, and, ultimately, hopeful. |
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| Knocking on Heaven's Door by Katy Butler |
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In this visionary memoir, based on a groundbreaking New York Times Magazine story, award-winning journalist Katy Butler ponders her parents’ desires for “Good Deaths” and the forces within medicine that stood in the way.
Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her vigorous and self-reliant parents when the call came: a crippling stroke had left her proud seventy-nine-year-old father unable to fasten a belt or complete a sentence. Tragedy at first drew the family closer: her mother devoted herself to caregiving, and Butler joined the twenty-four million Americans helping shepherd parents through their final declines.
Then doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, keeping his heart going but doing nothing to prevent his six-year slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he told his exhausted wife, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter were forced to confront a series of wrenching moral questions. When does death stop being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?”
When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a prolonged and agonizing death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother took another path. Faced with her own grave illness, she rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death head-on.
With a reporter’s skill and a daughter’s love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of medicine. Her provocative thesis is that modern medicine, in its pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents.
This revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that dying has become. And it chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a new movement trying to reclaim the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. It will inspire the difficult conversations we need to have with loved ones as it illuminates the path to a better way of death.
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| Learning to Say Goodby by Eda LeShan |
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Written for the whole family, this book opens the way to genuine communication between youngsters and adults so they can deal with the grief and bewilderment that follows the death of a parent. In simple direct language, the author discusses the questions, fears, fantasies, and stages of mourning that human beings need to go through - and offers a practical strategy, based on life experiences, to provide comfort and hope. |
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| Life Before Death - Collection of Films about living well and dying better |
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HOW WILL YOU DIE?
LIFE Before Death is a multi-award winning documentary series that asks the fundamental question underpinning our mortality.
This beautifully filmed journey takes us to 11 countries as we follow the remarkable health professionals battling the sweeping epidemic of pain that threatens to condemn one in every ten of us to an agonizing and shameful death. Through the eyes of patients and their families we discover the inherent humanity that empowers the best of us to care for those beyond cure.
This is an intimate, hopeful and life-affirming story of living well and dying better, advocating for making the most of every moment in our life before death. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Light In The Shadows by Hank Dunn |
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This little booklet is full of helpful meditations for the dying. As the author says in the intro, "In these few pages i have gathered the most helpful insights these patients have taught me. This book is about finding hope in hopeless situations; being grateful in the midst of great losses; experiencing a connection to things eternal; living a meaningful life while considering the possibility of death; and getting to the root issues in medical treatment decisions. |
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| Living Our Dying - by Joseph Sharp |
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When he wrote Living Our Dying, Joseph Sharp had been living with the HIV virus for over a decade, living each day with the knowledge that he will, eventually, die. For him, this has become the foundation of an intimate awareness of the beauty and majesty of life, in himself and in all those close to him, whether they've been diagnosed with a fatal illness or not. In this straightforward book, Sharp weaves his personal experiences, quotations from other spiritual and health authors, and suggested meditations into a moving proposal for the "rewriting" of our own lives as a conscious pilgrimage toward the inevitable outcome for ourselves and those we love. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Natural Transitions Magazine |
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NATURAL TRANSITIONS MAGAZINE is the ONLY magazine on CONSCIOUS, HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO END OF LIFE that’s also a forum for professional end-of-life caregivers and families with loved-ones facing end-of-life transition. We are a vehicle for the alternative death care Movement. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross |
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This is a classic book. "Dr Ross projects her warm understanding, sophistication, and sensitivity into every page...an excellent book on the management of the terminally ill...offers hope for the understanding of uman strengths and weaknesses experienced during a very difficult time". |
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| Ripening Time - Inside Stories for Aging with Grace - by Sherry Ruth Anderson |
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In Ripening Time: Inside Stories for Aging with Grace, Sherry Ruth Anderson presents a new perspective on aging. In her latest book, the bestselling author of The Feminine Face of God and The Cultural Creatives invites the reader to engage the aging process through the art of inner inquiry. She guides us beyond our culture's mind traps through stories where elders face into the lies, the losses and endings, the tender and bittersweet and ferocious truths of growing old. Giving us an indispensable compass, she shows how growing into old age can be a fruition, the genuine grace and gift of human ripening. |
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| Seasons by Anita Spencer |
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This book explores the life cycle of every woman from the spring of her life to the winter. |
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| The Bright Light of Death by Annabel Chaplin |
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This book looks at what happens at and just after the time of death. |
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| The End of Life Advisor - by S Dolan & A Vizzard |
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In this simple guide, you’ll find both practical step-by-step advice and compassionate, heartfelt guidance to dramatically improve the last days of life. Written by a mother-daughter team of hospice volunteers with experience in nursing, law, and psychology, The End-of-Life Advisor will show you the remarkable benefits of hospice care.
If you’re a healthcare or legal professional, you’ll discover the important ways you can advise your patients and clients. If you’re caring for a loved one, you’ll learn how you can help make their last days much more comfortable. If you’re planning for yourself, you’ll understand the decisions you need to make now – so you can find greater peace down the road. |
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| The Final Crossing by Scott Eberle |
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Joan Halifax: "This is an extraordinarily wise and compassionate book written by a physician of the body and the heart. In this beautifully written account of the death of his beloved teacher and friend, we can discover the great mystery of meeting death as a teacher and friend..." |
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| The Gifts of Grief - A film by Nancee Sabonya |
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Through compelling personal stories, we gain valuable insights from people facing, growing and transforming through grief. What can we learn from our losses? What inner and outer resources do we have to help us cope with our grief? How do we go on? What are the “gifts of grief?” These are the core questions that are explored by ordinary and extraordinary people, including writer, Isabel Allende; Reverend Cecil Williams; writer, Alana Laraine; Zen Monk /Vietnam Veteran, Claude AnShin Thomas; youth motivator, Vinny Ferrero; filmmaker, Lee Mun Wah who celebrate and inspire healing and transformation. The film invites us to open to pain, learn from loss, and teaches us about the preciousness of life. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| The Grace in Dying : How We Are Transformed Spiritually as We Die - by Kathleen Singh |
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Right from the start the author proclaims: "Dying is safe. You are safe. Your loved one is safe. That is the message of all the words here." True to her promise, she walks us through the final stages of death with complete honesty, yet she manages to quell the ultimate fear of dying. Speaking of the "Nearing Death Experience," Singh has discovered a sequence of phases or qualities that signals when a dying person is entering the final stages of spiritual and psychological transformation. She names them as relaxation, withdrawal, radiance, interiority (a time of going inward), silence, sacred, transcendence, knowing, intensity, and perfection--all of which she explains in great detail. This is an astonishingly intelligent and engrossing book about consciously surrendering our bodies and our egos to death. There are 500,000 hospice patients in the U.S. and 5 million hospice workers worldwide. And every one of them would probably find profound comfort in this breakthrough book on dying. --excerpted from a review by Gail Hudson |
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| The Most Excellent Dying of Theodore Jack Heckelman by Nancy Poer |
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When faced with cancer, Jack made a decision to die with gratitude and consciousness. Here, holding his beloved Pooh bear as a child, he could hardly have known the rich, fulfilling life and death that was to come. A communications engineer, he lived all over the world and was deeply committed to raising awareness of the global needs for social justice and caring for the earth. He was a leader in working for the Peace Academy and Earth Charter. |
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| The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's Final Chapter- by David Kessler |
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In gentle, compassionate language, this book helps us through the last chapter of our lives. The author has identified key areas of concern: the need to be treated as a living human being, the need for hope, the need to express emotions, the need to participate in care, the need for honesty, the need for spirituality, and the need to be free of physical pain. Examining the physical and emotional experiences of life-challenging illnesses, Kessler provides a vocabulary for family members and for the dying that allows them to communicate with doctors, with hospital staff, and with one another, and—at a time when the right words are exceedingly difficult to find—he helps readers find a way to say good-bye. Using comforting and touching stories, he provides information to help us meet the needs of a loved one at this important time in our lives. |
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| The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche |
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"A masterful distillation for the West on the priceless wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism that gives us practical instruction and spiritual guiance on how to live in light of the greatest teacher of all - death." |
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| The Trip Treatment - Article by Michael Pollan in the New Yorker |
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"Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results." This article primarily discusses the experimental use of psychedelics for mood disorders and of particular interest for us is its possible use for individuals who are facing their death. Michael Pollan is a well-known journalist and professor of journalism who has written extensively on food and botany. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| The True Work of Dying by J Bernard & M Schneider |
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This groundbreaking, holistic guide presents rare insights and reassuring practical advice on how to navigate the final weeks before death - physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Drawing on the rich and poignant experiences of their hospice patients, the authors show us that when the dying and their caregivers commit themselves to the true emotional and spiritual work of dying, healing is virtually inevitable, though it often comes in unexpected forms. |
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| The Ultimate End-of-Life Plan by Katy Butler |
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Good article in Wall Street Journal - Sept 6, 2013. How one woman fought the medical establishment and avoided what most Americans fear: prolonged, plugged-in suffering. About the author's mother who chose to forego surgery and other life-extending medical interventions. The article looks at those types of decisions and the impact they have on the dying person as well as the family members. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| The Unexpected Caregiver by Kari Berit |
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As their parents grow older, growing numbers of Baby Boomers find themselves thrust into a caregiver role, often with little warning or preparation. In a sense, they must function somewhat like activity directors in senior-care facilities, helping mom and dad come to terms with both day-to-day concerns and longer-term issues. Kari Berit brings extensive professional and personal insights to this subject. This book is a "splendid treasure chest of practical ideas that will help ease the stress of caring across generations". |
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| The Year of Magical Thinking - by Joan Didion |
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The book recounts Didion's experiences of grief after her husband's death of a cardiac arrest in their New York apartment. Days before his death, their daughter was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died. The narrative structure of the book follows Didion's re-living and re-analysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for her daughter. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book. |
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| Tuesdays With Morrie - Starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria |
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Mitch became caught up with his career as a sport commentator and journalist. He ignored his girlfriend and did not make time to do things in life that are of the most value to a human being. Morrie was one of Mitch's professors in college and a famous scholar. Mitch rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live. |
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| Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom |
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Amy Tan: "Mitch Albom was given a wonderful gift from his teacher Morrie Schwartz and now we have the great pleasure of auditing the same class. This is a true story that shines and leaves you forever warmed by its afterglow." There is a movie that is based on this book. |
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| When Parents Die: A Guide for Adults - by Edward Myers |
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The topics range from the psychological responses to a parent's death such as shock, depression, and guilt, to the practical consequences such as dealing with estates and funerals. |
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| Who Dies? by Stephen Levine |
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While many books have dealt with he "stages of dying", and particularly the stages of acceptance of death, this is the first to demonstrate how to "open to the immensity of living with death". This book shows us how to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next, be it sorrow, or joy, loss or gain, death or a new wonderment at life. |
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| Whose Life is it Anyway? - stars Richard Dreyfus |
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Ken Harrison is an artist that makes sculptures. One day he is involved in a car accident, and is paralyzed from his neck. All he can do is talk, and he wants to die. In hospital he make friends with some of the staff, and they support him when he goes to trial to be allowed to die. |
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| Wit - Starring Emma Thompson - directed by Mike Nichols |
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Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature known for her intense knowledge of metaphysical poetry, especially the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Her life takes a turn when she is diagnosed with metastatic Stage IV ovarian cancer. Oncologist Harvey Kelekian prescribes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease, and as she suffers through the various side-effects (such as fever, chills, vomiting, and abdominal pain), she attempts to put everything in perspective. The story periodically flashes back to previous moments in her life, including her childhood, her graduate school studies, and her career prior to her diagnosis. During the course of the film, she continually breaks the fourth wall by looking into the camera and expressing her feelings. |
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