33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

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I am happy to talk on end of life decisions in the elderly, dementia prevention, the history of stroke disease, biological ageing or other topics covered in 33 Meditation on Death. And I loathe fish, can't eat lamb and must steer clear of certain other foods that make my skin itch. David Jarrett's 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable.

A mixture of reminiscences drawn from the author's family life and a long medical career and reflections on how to deal with death and dying. How else will my caregivers (when I'm old and gaga) know I want a glass of Aussie Chardonnay at 7pm every evening. We are all going to die, at some stage, and decisions we make will inform our declining years - from 25 years on. Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. Old age and the end of life are things that we need to prepare for and discuss with our family members.I am interested in how modern medicine seems to have lost its way especially with excessive investigation and treatment of the very frail and elderly close to the end of their natural lives. This book will be helpful to anyone with ageing parents or people like myself who are old but not yet elderly. No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home. We all need to have conversation about what we want in the end and keep the conversation going with your family. I’ve recommended this book to so many and my parents have read this as a result (and also loved it)!

I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go. It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share.It presents a cogent argument for an alternative approach to the end of life from the one that has seen us sacrifice quality of years for quantity. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.