How We Die by Sherwin Nuland: An intensely realistic look at the most common ways people die and what happens in the body that leads to death. This book brings home the reality of your mortality. It also helps dispel the fantasy of many spiritual seekers that their death will be a serene moment in which they gracefull pass on while performing some spiritual practice which brings them enlightenment or other spiritual goodies. As this excerpt tells:
"My mother died in agony," she said, "and no matter how hard the doctors tried, they
couldn't make things easy for her. It was nothing like the peaceful end I expected. I thought
it would be spiritual, that we would talk about her life, about the two of us together. But it
never happened -- there was too much pain, too much Demerol...."
My patient needed a great deal of reassurance that there had been nothing unusual about the way
her mother died, that she had not done something wrong to prevent her mother from experiencing
that "spiritual" death with dignity that she had anticipated.... I tried to make clear to her that
the belief in the probablility of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with
the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their
very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity
in the process by which we die.
I have written this book to demythologize the process of dying. My intention is not to depict
it as a horror-filled sequence of painful and disgusting degradations, but to present it in its
biological and clinical reality, as seen by those who are witness to it and felt by those
who experience it. Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal
with those aspects that frighten us the most.
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