Final Acts

by Bauer-Maglin, Nan

• ISBN13: 9780813546285
• ISBN10: 0813546281
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-15
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

Today most people die gradually, from incremental illnesses, rather than from the heart attacks or fast-moving diseases that killed earlier generations. Given this new reality, the essays inFinal Actsexplore how we can make informed and caring end-of-life choices for ourselves and for those we love—and what can happen without such planning.Contributors include patients, caretakers, physicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers, educators, hospital administrators, academics, psychologists, and a poet, and among them are ethicists, religious believers, and nonbelievers. Some write moving, personal accounts of good” or ‘bad” deaths; others examine the ethical, social, and political implications of slow dying. Essays consider death from natural causes, suicide, and aid-in-dying (assisted suicide).Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying, treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends, caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government.For those who yearn for some measure of control over death, the essayists inFinal Acts,from very different backgrounds and with different personal and professional experiences around death and dying, offer insight and hope.

Author Biography

Nan Bauer-Maglin was formerly a professor of English, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and academic director of the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. She is the coeditor of several books, and the editor of Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women on the End of Their (Mostly) Long-Term Relationships (Rutgers University Press). Donna Perry is a professor of English at William Paterson University. She edited Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out and coedited (with Nan Bauer-Maglin) "Bad Girls/Good Girls": Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties (Rutgers University Press).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Personal Stories	p. 13
Notes on My Dying	p. 19
Live Longer or Live Better?	p. 29
"Life which is ours to know just once"	p. 33
Caregiving Beulah: A Relentless Challenge	p. 55
E-mails to Family and Friends: Claude and Maxilla-Declining Gently	p. 67
Whose Death is it, Anyway?	p. 91
The Family Tree	p. 111
Elegy for an Optimist	p. 123
Buddhist Reflections on Life and Death: A Personal Memoir	p. 126
Death as My Colleague	p. 139
Perspectives	p. 149
The Transformation of Death in America	p. 163
Unintended Consequences: Hospice, Hospitals, and the Not-So-Good Death	p. 183
The Hospital Ethics Committee: Solving Medical Dilemmas	p. 204
Ethical Principles for End-of-Life Decision Making	p. 220
Life or Death: Who Gets to Choose?	p. 238
Empowering Patients at the End of Life: Law, Advocacy, Policy	p. 252
Dying Down Under: From Law Reform to the Peaceful Pill	p. 268
Ageism and Late-Life Choices	p. 288
Physician-Assisted Suicide: Why Both Sides Are Wrong	p. 301
End of days	p. 312
About the Editors and Contributors	p. 315
Index	p. 321
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