FINAL AFFAIRS HELPFUL LINKS AND RESOURCES
Anatomical Board of the State of Florida (information and form for donation of body to science): https://anatbd.acb.med.ufl.edu/
https://anatbd.acb.med.ufl.edu/files/2018/02/Dedication_Form_Feb_2018.pdf
https://anatbd.acb.med.ufl.edu/donor-packet/dinstruct/
Designation of health-care surrogate: https://tinyurl.com/yyu4tfz8
Do Not Resuscitate Orders: https://www.floridahealth.gov/about/patient-rights-and-safety/do-not-resuscitate/index.html
Empath Health (Suncoast Hospice) website on advance directives (these forms are free):
https://empathhealth.org/advance-care-planning/
Five Wishes instructions and access to forms ($5 for individual form completed online, discounts for multiple printed forms)
https://www.fivewishes.org/history-and-mission/
https://store.fivewishes.org/ShopLocal/en/p/FO-000/five-wishes-digital
https://store.fivewishes.org/ShopLocal/en/start-page
Physicians Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Form: https://polstfl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/POLST-Form-July-10-2015.pdf
Statutory designation of health care surrogate for a minor: https://tinyurl.com/yxhu2f9x
Statutory form on living wills: https://tinyurl.com/y4mlrh68
Yellow Dot and Vial of Life Programs: https://www.pinellascounty.org/publicsafety/yellow_dot.htm
Further Reading on End-of-Life Issues
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End, by Atul Gawande
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune, now in paperback with a new reading group guide.
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures — in his own practices as well as others’ — as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life, all the way to the very end.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
#1 New York Times Bestseller. 2014 National Book Award Finalist, winner of the inaugural 2014 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the 2014 Books for a Better Life Award, winner of the 2015 Reuben Award from National Cartoonists Society
New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
The particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies: an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia … and a mother, a former assistant principal, whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades. The themes, however, are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? shows the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller. This book is available in the Cathedral library.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
#1 New York Times bestseller; Pulitzer Prize finalist; Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir; Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage
At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student — “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” — into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ ” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
This classic book explores the now-famous idea of the five stages of dealing with death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. With sample interviews and conversations, Dr. Kugler-Ross gives the reader a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, the professionals who serve the patient, and the patient’s family, brining hope, solace and peace of mind to all involved. This book is available in the Cathedral library.
Knocking On Heaven’s Door by Katy Butler
Award-winning journalist Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her aging parents when the call came: Her beloved 79-year-old father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the more than 28-million Americans who are shepherding loved ones through their final declines.
Doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent a slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter faced wrenching moral questions. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?”
When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death the old-fashioned way: head-on.
Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, is creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is inspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.