A Few Months to Live: Different Paths to Life's End 2001

This book describes what dying looks like from the perspective of nine terminally ill people and their carers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included in-depth interviews in a home care setting, the book focuses on how the participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, managed their symptoms - especially pain - and sought meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are largely presented in the participants' own words, illustrating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the 'bad news', through the final days of life and the memorial services. Describing the nationwide crisis surrounding end-of-life care, the authors argue that the informal care of relatives and close friends is a vast and too often invisible resource that deserves special public attention.