Being mortal: medicine and what matters in the end

by Atul Gawande

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mortality philosophy health
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Read this book before you turn 60. In fact, read it before you’re 40. Read it before your parents are 60. Read it if you have parents! Read it if you’re a person who is likely to die sometime in the future.

This book gave me tools for the hard decisions that exist for people in the last decade(s) of their lives. Before reaching this stage of life ourselves, we don’t think about it much because we’ve tended to separate the aged from our communities. We’ve lost a cultural understanding of what a good death looks like. This book brings that knowledge back to a world with modern medicine.

Beyond all that, this book helped me become more comfortable with my own eventual aging and death. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.