Last year, at the height of the pandemic, I both lost and almost lost a few family members. There are many coping mechanisms in the face of such mortality: denying, crying, praying, comedy, throwing yourself into work, not being able to work, and so on. Mine was binge-reading books about death, and not only has it helped me get by but it has also slapped me in the face that life truly is impermanent.
Some of the books I read were written by doctors—people who face death regularly and perhaps think about death more frequently than the average person. So whether you’re coping with death in some way or are looking to be a health professional, these books will give you honest and important perspectives on death, dying, and being a doctor. If you’re someone who will die one day, then these are must-reads.
Spoiler alert: I cried in all of these.
“The depth of the lows is the price you pay for the height of the highs.”
Based on Kay’s diaries while he was a junior doctor for the UK’s National Health Service, This Is Going to Hurt strikes the perfect balance between heart-wrenching sadness and absurd comedy. Kay studied medicine for 6 years then worked as a doctor for another 6 before he quit because of a particularly horrifying incident at the hospital (a last straw kind of thing, really).
This book reminds me so much of Fleabag, complete with its quintessential British humor mingling with small but profound moments of vulnerability throughout. Like Fleabag, This Is Going to Hurt can also get wildly outrageous but because Kay worked in obstetrics and gynaecology—where stories of gore and guts spilling out, emergency caesareans, and pulling things out of patients’ anuses abound—its yuck factor is on a whole other level, which is of course all part of the fun. It’s rare for a book to make me laugh out loud, and this actually made me laugh multiple times!
Still, I’m incredibly moved by this story. When Kay signed up to medical school at age 16, he had never anticipated the day-to-day severity of being a doctor—the meaningless administrative work and deep emotional strain, the lack of sick leaves, praise, recognition, and pay raises, the atrocious hours and the propensity for cancelling prior engagements last minute just to prioritize healing other people. Working as an OB-GYN, death is as rife in the workplace as life. Kay’s personal life suffered greatly under the strain of being a doctor.
Of course, there were good days too. Days when Kay received thank-you notes from patients, days when he’d drive home happy knowing that he did something worthwhile, and days when he and dying patients chatted with each other like two human beings instead of a problem and a solution. Days when he literally saved lives.
This is a powerful book—one that humanizes healthcare professionals at an individual and personal level. If you’re one or planning to be one, then you should definitely read this!
“By encountering death many thousands of times, I have come to a view that there is usually little to fear and much to prepare for.”
Mannix has been a palliative care doctor for more than 30 years, specializing in relieving pain particularly for those who are towards the end of their lives. Written in the gentlest tone I’ve ever come across, With the End in Mind tells different people’s stories of how they dealt with their impending deaths, and how Mannix guided them through it all.
This book is surprisingly very comforting and full of hope. Mannix emphasizes the importance of being honest with each other towards the end of someone’s life—that well-intentioned lies, denial, and not talking about death waste precious time and disallow inevitable goodbyes. Death is something we need to prepare for because it’s inevitable. It’s not something we should or can avoid.
And there’s actually little to fear in death. As Mannix explains, “We see people spending more time asleep, and less time awake. Sometimes when they appear to be only asleep, they are actually unconscious, yet when they wake up they tell us they had a good sleep. It seems we don’t notice that we become unconscious. And so, at the very end of life, a person is simply unconscious all of the time. And then their breathing starts to change. Sometimes deep and slow, sometimes shallow and faster, and then, very gently, the breathing slows down, and very gently stops. No sudden rush of pain at the end. No feeling of fading away. No panic. Just very, very peaceful…”
Of course, it’s a very sad book. From a twenty-two-year-old with cystic fibrosis panicking that he was about to die, to a newly wed woman who only has weeks left but is in denial of her cancer, and two grandma best friends spending the last months of their lives together, my tears kept escaping from my eyeballs.
Death comes for us all, and this book equips you with the vocabulary, etiquette, and compassion to prepare for either our own deaths or our loved ones’ when the time comes. Knowing that everything passes also helps you prioritize the most important things in your life now. As Mannix stated, “Living is precious, and is perhaps best appreciated when we live with the end in mind.”
“And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.”
At thirty-five years old, on the verge of launching into a prolific career in neurosurgery after decades of studying and training and researching, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. And just like that, the future he had imagined for so long came to an end and he had to improvise a new one.
Written during the very last year of his life, Kalanithi’s memoir contains more than just ruminations of what dying is like first-hand. For all his life, he was mainly interested in the question of what makes life worth living, which is why he went into neuroscience in the first place; the brain is the epicenter of human identity. Now that he was dying and confronting his own mortality, this particular question became even more relevant to his life.
For all his lyrical prose and profound insights though, the most moving part of this book was the epilogue that his wife wrote after his death, where my tears and snot became out of control. And while this book didn’t ultimately penetrate the human condition as deeply as I’d hoped it would and lacked the messiness and complexity in character that I always crave in books, I still think it’s an insightful read. It humanizes both doctor and patient, from the perspective of a man who’d been both. I also started to seriously evaluate the things that are most important to me after reading this book, because we’ll really never know when we’ll go.
Another acclaimed book about death, dying, and doctors is American surgeon Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. I unfortunately haven’t gotten around to reading it yet but the reviews online are all raving about it!
And lastly, thinking about death also necessarily means thinking about life. In 3 Self-Help Books That Actually Help, I talk about how Happy and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone changed the way I go about my life. Both of them actually deal with death as well, just not to the same extent as the books in this list have. They’re more about living. Check that out if you’re interested!
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That’s all for now. Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
These books look interesting! Can you write/research about how to practice resilience during adversity? discovering one’s passion or purpose in life? And maybe you can write a letter to your younger/older self? 🙂
Oh my, these are great ideas!!! Thank you so much 😊