With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

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She doesn't fill up the book with pages of medical jargon, but instead talks about many of the patients that she has met during the years and how her job helps them to deal with end of life care. Now Kathryn Mannix joins this distinguished group and her voice, though quiet and calm, is distinctive.

I am a retired physician and I will be dying from metastatic cancer; I don't know when, I have not asked. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. In my limited experience, a couple of deaths have fit her model, and a few others have involved more pain and discomfort than she describes but were otherwise similar.

This book gently guides the reader through various scenarios in the form of stories about patients with various challenges facing the end of their lives. It is Henry James’s “distinguished thing”, Martin Amis’s backing to the mirror, Rochefoucauld’s sun that we must not stare at too long lest we go blind with seeing. I was a bit startled by some of the negative reviews for this book which I read when I was half way through. It’s not a number – it’s a direction of travel, a movement over time, a tiptoe journey towards a tipping point.

But ultimately I have to judge With the End in Mind as a book that Mannix has written, separating it from Mannix's personal achievements, and in this context, it fell very short. The book starts with Sabine's story and looks particularly at the process of dying and the need for honesty at such a time. I really would hope that this book would be widely read and not simply by those directly interested from a medical perspective - as the author tells us we will all die one day.

At the end of each batch of stories there is a "pause for thought" section to allow people to consider their own positions. I also salute the brave and dignified men and women who’s stories you have sensitively jumbled and then shared with us. In his final letter, he wrote of living a “posthumous existence”; his last phrase becomes his eloquent, courteous and self-effacing goodbye before he exits the stage on which he has had such a small parcel of time: “I always made an awkward bow. This was a book to take in slowly, chapter per chapter, intimate and tender story per intimate and beautifully written story. Dying is made special in this book because it is given back its precious highly emotionally charged as well as matter of fact place in life.

People witnessed death, dealt with it, prepared for it, even embraced it ( John Donne used to sleep in his own coffin; Jeremy Taylor wrote his 17th-century manuals for the soul, Holy Living and Holy Dying, which became the preeminent works of the ars moriendi tradition; in The Tempest, Prospero consigns himself to an old age in which every third thought will be of death).Even then, death is often held at bay and life prolonged at all costs: the fragile and disintegrating body is plugged into machines, pumped full of oxygen and blood and drugs, its gallant heart restarted and kept going, no matter the pain, no matter the hopelessness of the endeavour, no matter that at a certain point this isn’t living, just a slowed-down, drawn-out, painful and undignified dying. Sometimes the stories almost moved me to tears, and I was interested to learn many things about dying and how it often follows a very recognisable pattern. It's crucial to feel that you trust and respect the voice that is telling you such sensitive stories, but With the End in Mind left me feeling frustrated, angry and suspicious.