It is a very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family. We all need to have conversation about what we want in the end and keep the conversation going with your family. My cynical side thinks it’s because keeping an old patient alive generates way more money for the medical community.

I want everyone at the age of seventy to discuss and document what medical interventions they would be willing to accept over their next decade or so of life. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome. I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. I have a plan in the end and won't be left suffering more needlessly because of lacking a NDR directive. I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I read this book over the course of one day and now I am passing it on to friends to read and discuss.This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. He marries the importance of keeping ourselves useful with the necessity not to take ourselves too seriously. Like many lapsed Catholics the author is sometimes guilty of imagining that a Roman Catholic understanding of how to respond to death and what religion means is the only valid (but wrong) way of being religious.