Two Weeks of Life

I was up far too late last night finishing this book.

Eleanor Clift, the author, is a reporter whose husband was dying at home under hospice care during the same two weeks that Teri Schiavo's feeding tube had been disconnected.

I had ordered the book when I read the review in the New York Times, because one of the things I wanted to use this daily blog to write about was my experiences last year with the death of my friend Bonnie.

I had expected to be more interested in the account of the husband's death than in the interviews with all the participants in the Teri Schiavo frenzy. I was, but the Schiavo stuff was better than I expected, especially the stuff about the role of the Catholic Church.

For instance, a small number of weeks before he died, Pope John Paul II had read a pronouncement that getting food and water through a tube was not an "extraordinary means" of prolonging life, which was interpreted by some people to mean that Catholics were prohibited from ordering the removal of feeding tubes. However, in his own end of life care, a feeding tube was inserted and removed twice.

One of the links between the two stories is that Clift feels the hospice movement didn't do a good job of getting the message out about what its aims were, when hospice caregivers were being attacked as murderers by the Right to Life people.

My own experience with the hospice facility where Bonnie spent her last month was very different from the one described in this book, probably mostly because I wasn't being a caregiver, so I wasn't getting all the training and support I would have needed to do that. My difficulties communicating with Bonnie's caregivers are another post, but I was certainly glad to have the internet to look up vocabulary like "active phase of dying", because I wasn't getting good explanations of it from the caregivers.

One of the points of this book is one I have been trying to make since last year: that we spend too little time thinking and talking about dying, which makes it much more difficult for us to get through it when we finally have to.

Anyway, if you're interested in any of these issues, this is a well-written book. It could have used a bit tighter editing: there are places where the same anecdote is repeated in different chapters, But on the whole, it's really well-written and if you want to think about how to communicate with the medical profession and how to make decisions about how to die and what the religious contribution to the politics of all these decisions is, you should read this book.

Related posts:

1. Timeline of Bonnie's death
2. The Spare Room
3. One third down