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A Dignified Ending challenges the idea that prolonging life by every means possible is the only reasonable response to a dire diagnosis or to intractable suffering. It uses true accounts to illustrate how people have choreographed their deaths, and it recommends that death with dignity laws include dementias and other neurodegenerative disorders.
List of contents
Part I.
Foreword
Chapter 1. The Admiral and His Wife
Chapter 2. The Geriatric Romeo and Juliet
Chapter 3. It's Not Like She's Suffering
Chapter 4. Sigmund Freud's Cancer
Chapter 5.You Don't Want Custer
Chapter 6. How Life Turned Out
Chapter 7. Putting the 'Mensch' in Dementia
Chapter 8. You Won't Let Me Suffer?
Chapter 9. My Way
Chapter 10. Fate Worse Than Death
Chapter 11. Nothing But Torture
Part II
Chapter 12. Goodbye, My Love
Chapter 13 .Dr. Death
Chapter 14. Hemlock
Chapter 15. A Well-Worn Sweater
Chapter 16. Bring Out Yer Dead
Chapter 17. The Federation
Chapter 18. Caring Friends
Chapter 19. The Metamorphosis of Caring Friends
Chapter 20. The New Dr. Death
Chapter 21. The Final Two Cases
Part III
Chapter 22. Four Boxes of Chocolate
Chapter 23. On Her Own Terms
Chapter 24. Golden Summer
Chapter 25. Don't Sugarcoat It
Chapter 26. Enough is Enough
Chapter 27. What She Wanted
Chapter 28. Cowboys, Mormons, and Sundance
Part IV
Chapter 29. We Have Choices
Chapter 30. Last Thoughts
Author's Notes, Acknowledgments
About the author
Lew Cohen is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts-Baystate School of Medicine, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Medicine and Health, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency awards, and a Bogliasco Fellowship for the Arts and Humanity, as well as the Eleanor and Thomas Hackett Award from the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. He is author or co-editor of several books, including No Good Deed.
Summary
A Dignified Ending challenges the idea that prolonging life by every means possible is the only reasonable response to a dire diagnosis or to intractable suffering. It uses true accounts to illustrate how people have choreographed their deaths, and it recommends that death with dignity laws include dementias and other neurodegenerative disorders.
