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

3.0

I have mixed feelings about this book. Sometimes the stories almost moved me to tears, and I was interested to learn many things about dying and how it often follows a very recognisable pattern. But there are also things that irritated me and make me question elements of the narrative, which of course make me question it all. We are presented with case histories of patients facing the end of their life, how they cope (or don't), and what help Mannix and her team (and others) are able to provide via palliative care. In her introduction, Mannix states that in the book, 'the experience of several people is woven into a single individual's narrative, to allow specific aspects of the journey to be depicted'. And this is my first problem. The narratives feel generic; the people often feel generic, as though all their idiosyncrasies have been sanded down or air-brushed out. They were sometimes 'beautiful' or 'handsome', and none of them seem very real. And secondly, Mannix and all of the wider NHS staff that we meet along the way are nearly all calm and happy and lovely. I know a lot of NHS staff and they are lovely, but they are also often stressed, irritated by patients and managers, despairing of all they are expected to do in so little time for so little money. Clearly, this book isn't about that, but I would have liked the professionals to also have a little more personality too. Despite all that, the idea of this book; the spirit of it makes it worth reading.