Books
Discover informative and supportive books on end-of-life care
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Supplemental Reading Materials:
Books by Academics and Clinicians
A hospice nurse reflects on the many decisions and considerations families engage when electing hospice care for themselves and loved ones.
A prominent palliative care physician shares the true stories of patients at the end of life and how important emotional work can be accomplished in the final months, weeks, and even days of life. It is a companion for families, showing them how to deal with doctors, how to talk to loved ones, and how to make the end of life as meaningful and enriching as the beginning.
Two hospice nurses share their intimate experiences with patients at the end of life, drawing from more than twenty years’ experience tending the terminally ill.
As a leading specialist in bioethics and health ministries, the author explores how God’s gift of healing is available during all seasons of a person’s life and how the power of hope and healing are affirmed and redirected through liturgical services, sacraments, and rites.
Drawing on true cases of ill and dying children, this book explores explanations for suffering and evil in today’s world.
This book presents a 26-step program designed to return control and peace to those who have entered this stage of life and to help all involved—the dying, their families, and health-care providers alike—appreciate the challenges dying presents: creating a living will, finding forgiveness, and peace of mind.
A 30-year journey into the biology of hope explored through the lens of a physician, from medical school through clinical practice. The author seeks to understand the difference between true hope and false hope, and answer: Why do some people find and sustain hope during difficult circumstances, while others do not?
Books by Network Members
A culturally sensitive resource for African Americans to use as a way to talk about advance care planning options and end-of-life issues with their loved ones.
The Conversation is a radical re-envisioning of the patient-doctor relationship that offers ways for patients and families to talk about death, and for patients to be at the center and charge of their medical care.
Books on Denial and Grief
Written after his wife’s tragic death, this is a reflection on the issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss.
A guide to the current literature on death and dying, with special attention to the narratives of terminally ill people offering counsel to the dying, their caregivers, and the bereaved.
Through survivors’ stories, engage in depth tales of survival that illustrate the poignant disruption of life and suffering that loss entails. It shows how through grieving, one can overcome challenges, make choices, and reshape their lives.
As a cancer patient herself, the author discusses how the myths and metaphors surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, she shows cancer for what it is–just a disease.
This Pulitzer Prize book is an impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence that tackles the problem of man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality.
This is an inspiring and profoundly insightful meditation on the meaning of grief, showing how it can be the path toward a lasting love of those who have died. Recounting dozens of stories of people who have struggled with deaths in their lives, the author describes grieving as a transition from loving in presence to loving in separation.
This book describes how parents lose, find, or relocate spiritual anchors after the death of their child. It describes how ordinary people reconstruct their lives after their foundations have shifted, and how they make sense of their world after one of their centers of meaning has been removed.
Books on Hope and Healing
A collection of true stories drawing on the concept of “kitchen table wisdom”– the human tradition of shared experience that shows us life in all its power and mystery and reminds us that the things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain and enrich our lives.
Examining the end of life in the light of current psychological understanding, religious wisdom, and compassionate medical science, this book offers a fresh, deeply comforting message of hope and courage as we contemplate the meaning of our mortality.
Blending historical and theological scholarship with practical applications that will encourage churches to restore their historic tradition of healing, this book offers a balanced, persuasive prescription for promoting health in the church’s healing ministry.
A personal account of making sense of the grieving and mourning following her husband’s death and the multiple hospitalizations plaguing her daughter’s life.
Books on Medicine and Ministry
This book explores health care, a field that is continually being introduced to new treatments, new challenges, new people, new regulations, new expectations, and new time limits.
This book details how the churches can be supportive of physicians, nurses, chaplains, and social workers working in end of life issues, and how they can enlist their help in informing their own congregations about the realities of death.
Bringing the biblical tradition to bear on contemporary bioethical concerns, such as the moral challenges medical technologies pose to Christian faith and decision-making, the author argues that churches are called to think and speak clearly about bioethical concerns, and he lays out here the scriptural tools for them to do so.
An overview of issues involved in offering spiritual care in contemporary Western society, with a particular focus on implications for palliative care. This book is shaped by the conviction that palliative care needs to incorporate relevant and informed approaches to spiritual care in order to evolve as a holistic, life-affirming discipline.
Using a personal account of a loved ones death, this book takes the reader on a journey of how modern medicine distances itself from dealing with people as living beings beyond their immediate physicality.
This book offers insight into how we view death and the care of the critically ill or dying and suggests ways of understanding death that can lead to a peaceful acceptance.
Books on Prayer, Reflection, and Ritual
A prayer book, written in first person, focusing on the spiritual needs of those who are near death.
A New York Times book critic, book review editor, and essayist penned this collection of humorous essays on the ideals of life and death—many of which were written during his battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990.
This poet offers a poignant rendering of her own personal psalms of lament and mourning. She draws from the rich heritage of Scripture to give voice to the grief and anguish she has felt.
A practical guide for family, clergy, funeral professionals, and hospice workers to plan services and rituals that honor the deceased. It includes real-life stories that touch on sensitive, yet important issues, such as family alienation, forgiveness, and hope.
A testimonial and handbook on the use of personalized and creative rituals to help the dying prepare for their death while bringing peace, reconciliation, and acceptance both to themselves and to the loved ones they leave behind.
A deep reflection on on how different cultures, informed by religious beliefs and sometimes desperate hope, teach people to respond to their own death and the deaths of others in modes as various as defiance, stoic resignation, and unbridled grief.
At the age of 88, this Pulitzer Prize winning author reflects on conversations with a wide range of people on their thoughts on death and religion.
Books on Religious Perspectives and Practice
One of the simplest facts of life―that we all die―seems like the most complicated thing we do. This book offers an important examination of the theological, spiritual, and ethical issues surrounding death.
Working on the premise that one dies the way one lives, this book explores how Christian practices ― love, prayer, lament, compassion, and so on ― can contribute to the process of dying well.
After 30 years of work with medical professionals, families, and the sick and dying on the issues of medical treatment at the end of life, the author outlines eight major issues regarding end-of-life care through the lens of Catholic medical ethics.
Using the virtues of patience, compassion, and hope as a framework for specifying the shape of a good death, this book considers naming the practices Christians should develop to live well and die well.
Books on Suicide and Physician-Assisted Death
The first contemporary study of assisted death to integrate insights from ethics, theology, philosophy, medicine, law, and sociology, this book provides a broad framework within which to weigh arguments for and against the practices of assisted suicide and euthanasia as public policy in the United States.
Two doctors uncover why pleas for patient autonomy and compassion, often used in favor of legalizing euthanasia, do not advance or protect the rights of terminally ill patients. This book urges the medical profession to improve palliative care and develop a more humane response to the complex issues facing those who are terminally ill.
Despite a growing consensus by physicians, ethicists, lawyers, and activists that effective palliative care should be a core element in the treatment of all terminally ill patients, questions remain about the physician’s role in helping suffering patients end their lives. This group of presents the case for the legalization of physician-assisted dying for terminally ill patients who voluntarily request it.
