Should we die at home or in hospital? What kind of care should we receive? Can we understand what the dying actually experience and move past our fear of their presence? Is dying really so difficult?
These questions, and many others, drive this book—which faces head-on a topic most of us avoid and dread: death, our new taboo.
The author is an expert in the truest sense: a ward sister who has worked in a unit for patients considered beyond medical cure. She has sat with more than eight hundred dying people. Through that experience, she has come to see that hospital death—the most common kind—need not mean loneliness and abandonment. Starting from the observation (obvious, yet not obvious enough) that "the dying person is still, after all, a living person," she examines in technical detail the anatomy of death itself, the psychology of dying (drawing on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's framework of the stages of dying), and the expanded role that hospitals can and should play in caring for people in their final hours. Inevitably, the book addresses urgent ethical questions: over-treatment, or conversely, euthanasia.
It speaks to anyone willing to engage with this subject we so often ignore. The author writes from a professional viewpoint—in places, the book reads almost as a practical guide for medical and nursing staff, offering them genuine professional preparation that marries technical skill with personal sensitivity and maturity.
From her experience, Christiane Jomain concludes that with such preparation in place, everyone—even in a hospital—can have the hope of dying peacefully.
by Anna Cece, 1986
