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Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?

By Atul Gawande — 2010

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid.

Read on www.newyorker.com

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An Introduction to the Death-Positive Movement

In most modern cultures, it’s common for people to feel uneasy about death. We express this discomfort by avoiding conversations on the topic and lowering our voices when speaking of the dead and dying.

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Terminal Options for the Irreversibly Ill

My Feb. 5 column, “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit,” prompted a deluge of information and requests for information on how people too sick to reap meaningful pleasure from life might be able to control their death.

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Alternatives for the Final Disposition

Though I wince at the redundancy, funeral “pre-planning” is a phenomenon receiving increased attention, and a growing number of Web-based guides tell how to go about it. As www.funerals.org puts it: “Funeral planning starts at home.

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What Death Teaches About Life: An Interview with Frank Ostaseski

Frank Ostaseski, an internationally respected Buddhist teacher and pioneer in end-of-life care, has accompanied over 1,000 people through their dying process.

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A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit

Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.

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Seven Keys to a Good Death

Is a “good death” just an oxymoron? Or can the experience of death be far more positive—an opportunity for growth and meaning?

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What Is Death?

This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. It’s one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own.

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Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush: Walking Each Other Home

Tami Simon interviews Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who have written a new beautiful book, called Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying. It explores what it means to live and die consciously, remembering who we really are, and illuminating the path that we all walk together.

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How ‘Death Doulas’ Can Help People at the End of Their Life

They’re changing how we approach end-of-life care.

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Mindful Death

Facing our own mortality can be uncomfortable and, for some, distressing. But when we befriend death—when we approach death mindfully—its force doesn’t necessarily derail us in the same way.

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