The primary thought on reading this book is that if you enjoyed Being Mortal by Atul Gawande then this very much feels like a companion read. She talks to patients that have rooms full of their family, dealing with the anger and unfairness of it all, we learn about a young man who does not have long to live, but was still considering suicide as he is so despondent that he will never leave a legacy, but he is one of the first in the country to carry a plan detailing what should happen should he become ill.

She clearly describes the actual process of death by gradual illness to the people in her care, their families, and the reader. Mainly though, to feel at as much ease as is possible as she comes to the end and what that end will likely look like - which I can share with her too. Having qualified as a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist in 1993, she started the UK s (possibly the world s) first CBT clinic exclusively for palliative care patients, and devised CBT First Aid training to enable palliative care colleagues to add new skills to their repertoire for helping patients. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone, regardless of age, as an educational, moral, and preparatory text that will allow the reader to deal with their own death and those of loved ones more meaningfully and considerately.In my limited experience, a couple of deaths have fit her model, and a few others have involved more pain and discomfort than she describes but were otherwise similar. I really liked her narrative style, which was sufficiently descriptive but always compassionate and with a touch of humour. It is a real insight into what happens in end-of-life care in hospices across the world and indeed in East Kent.

I found it a great comfort and now feel better equipped to talk about death, and to consider what's important in my life. They say that the Victorians were happy to talk about death, but not sex, and now we’ve reversed that as no conversation about sex seems too much, and yet we can’t even bring ourselves to use words like died/dead/death, only passed or lost or late. This book contains a lot of personal stories, all different in the same way that we are all different people. The book is structured around a series of fictionalised case studies drawn from Mannix's own experiences, many of which are deeply affecting.Interestingly centred around the time when the perspective of life and meaning are under scrutiny and question. It also ignores the significant number of individuals who are either rich enough to travel from the UK to Switzerland or not so rich but just as desperate - and so who throw themselves down stairs / try to poison / or suffocate themselves - all alone since they are concerned for their family with the current law. To be fair, it is stated somewhere in the book that it's not so much about dying as choosing what kinds of times we have while we're alive.

I really would hope that this book would be widely read and not simply by those directly interested from a medical perspective - as the author tells us we will all die one day. We might not like the thought of ripping the rotting flesh from our loved one’s bones, but for some, burning a body is equally repugnant. Unfortunately in our society we seem to have become afraid of dying and being able to talk to people facing death.Dying as a performance, dying as an art and a practice, dying as something solemnly profound and sorrowful and at the same time as normal, natural; dying as physical and as spiritual; dying as the end of a whole world because, as Oliver Sacks wrote, when dying himself: “There is no one like anyone else, ever. Tears were never far from my eyes as I read about a head teacher with motor neurone disease; a pair of women with metastatic breast cancer who broke their hips and ended up as hospice roommates; a beautiful young woman who didn’t want to stop wearing her skinny jeans even though they were exacerbating her nerve pain, as then she’d feel like she’d given up; and a husband and wife who each thought the other didn’t know she was dying of cancer. I tried to read it from a dual perspective, as a professional and academic in this field but also as a person inquisitive about their own death and those of my loved ones.