A review by beth_currie
With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix

4.0

I loved most of this book. I was not enamoured with the author's stance against assisted dying. I disagreed with the points she made on this topic and felt her arguments were inherently flawed. For example, she told the story of a man with motor neurone disease who wanted to kill himself before he got too weak to do so. He was unable to, and later ended up being glad that he had lived long enough to spend a last Christmas with his family. Kathryn uses this to argue that assisted dying should not be allowed because we are all more resilient than we think we are. This makes no logical sense to me - if assisted dying was an option, he wouldn't have felt he had to kill himself so early in his illness because he would have known he had a "get out" later on if things became intolerable and he needed it.

Anyway, apart from that gripe I really liked this book. It tells stories of many deaths and it made me cry a lot but I also found it beautiful and moving and uplifting. It has inspired me to read more about death and dying, to come up with my own plans and think about things like DNR, and even to consider doing some voluntary work with people near death.