How long am I going to live? Who will be with me when I die? Will my family forgive me? Will I have pain? These are among the 31 vital end-of-life questions patients and their families ask. This audiobook is about navigating those last days, at the bedside, and saying farewell with hope, love, and compassion. Dr. Edward Creagan provides the reassuring answers patients and families deserve. He has dedicated his life to death. For over 40 winters at the Mayo Clinic he has been at the bedside with more than 40,000 patient encounters in the last stages of their lives on this Earth.

People die everyday. While most people in America die in a hospital, many families choose hospice for end of life care. Death, as experienced by hospice nurses, can be beautiful, peaceful, humorous, touching, tragic, disturbing, and even otherworldly. Hospice nurses act as midwives to dying people every day. Death transforms not just the patient and family, but the hospice nurse as well. The stories in this book are presented with the hope that their transformation extends to you, too. Heidi Telpner, R.N.

Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.

When we fear death, we miss out on a lot of life. This book hopes to change that. While hospices care for persons in their final days, hospice is not about death. It's all about LIFE - real, nitty-gritty, poignant, funny, challenging, and bittersweet life in all its beauty and imperfection.

In this deeply affecting and uplifting book, Janet Wehr shares the real-life stories of her many years as a hospice nurse. Her first-hand account gives illuminating and comforting insight into the spiritual aspect of what occurs in the transition between life and death, highlighting the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection as it manifests in the dying process. It also gives a candid impression of hospices and hospice nurses and the services they can provide. All of Janet’s 46 personal stories are true, fascinating, heart-felt, and thought-provoking. 

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross created her classic seminal work, On Death and Dying, to offer us a new perspective on the terminally ill. It is not a psychoanalytic study, nor is it a "how-to" manual for managing death. Rather, it refocuses on the patient as a human being and a teacher, in the hope that we will learn from him or her about the final stages of life.

This collection of true narratives reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first "sticks", first births, and first deaths and reflect on what gets them though long, demanding shifts and keeps them in the profession.

A summer with terminal patients wasn’t what Sonia had in mind when she signed up for her school’s nursing internship program. With no previous exposure to death or dying, Sonia joins the ragtag team at Tender Hands Hospice (Your Best Last Resort) and becomes the center of attention to the oddball nurses who work in end-of-life care. 

If you or a loved one are facing an "end of life" experience, Seven Keys to a Peaceful Passing provides an informative and warm-hearted view on how to make the hospice system function best for patients and families. This easy-to-read road map guides you through important decisions which will help ensure a “peaceful passing”.

On Death and Dying began as a theoretical book, an interdisciplinary study of our fear of death and our inevitable acceptance of it. It introduced the world to the now-famous five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. On Grief and Grieving applies these stages to the process of grieving and weaves together theory, inspiration, and practical advice, all based on Kübler-Ross' and Kessler's professional and personal experiences.

The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.  

Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most. Life and death are a package deal. They cannot be pulled apart, and we cannot truly live unless we are aware of death. The Five Invitations is an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves.

Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty - a 20-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre - took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. With an original voice that combines fearless curiosity and mordant wit, Caitlin tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and very dead).

When we fear death, we miss out on a lot of life. This book hopes to change that. While hospices care for persons in their final days, hospice is not about death. It's all about LIFE - real, nitty-gritty, poignant, funny, challenging, and bittersweet life in all its beauty and imperfection.

Sharing her journey from bedridden patient to inspired healer, Robbie Holz recounts her recovery from hepatitis C, fibromyalgia, and treatment-induced brain damage, as well as the blossoming of her own healing powers, through her work with her husband, the late healer Gary Holz, and her experiences with a remote tribe in the Outback of Australia. Through her story of healing and discovery, Robbie describes principles from the 60,000-year-old Aboriginal culture that can help create transformation in your life.

This collection of true stories champions the daily contributions, commitments, and sacrifices of nurses and portrays the compassion, intellect, and wit necessary to meet the challenging demands of the profession.

Abby Maslin shares an inspiring story of resilience and commitment in a deeply affecting new memoir. After her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury, the couple worked together as he recovered - and they learned to love again.  

As the American-born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming listeners with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us. 

People die everyday. While most people in America die in a hospital, many families choose hospice for end of life care. Death, as experienced by hospice nurses, can be beautiful, peaceful, humorous, touching, tragic, disturbing, and even otherworldly. Hospice nurses act as midwives to dying people every day. Death transforms not just the patient and family, but the hospice nurse as well. The stories in this book are presented with the hope that their transformation extends to you, too. Heidi Telpner, R.N.

As a hospice chaplain, Kerry Egan didn't offer sermons or prayers unless they were requested; in fact, she found, the dying rarely want to talk about God, at least not overtly. Instead she discovered she'd been granted an invaluable chance to witness firsthand what she calls the "spiritual work of dying" - the work of finding or making meaning of one's life, the experiences it's contained, and the people who have touched it, the betrayals, wounds, unfinished business, and unrealized dreams.

This collection of true narratives reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first "sticks", first births, and first deaths and reflect on what gets them though long, demanding shifts and keeps them in the profession.

I Will Love You Forever reveals one woman's decades-long quest to find healing and redemption after the accidental death of her sister as a child. Since 2012, God has used hospice babies - those left to live and die without family to care for them - to mend Cori's broken heart. Bringing these fragile hospice babies into their home, Cori and her family have promised not only to hold them briefly, until their last breath on this side of heaven, but to love them forever and always.

Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Inexplicably, despite her fatal pulmonary condition, she could still sing. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved.

Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.