Parenting and Caring Collection & Staff Wellbeing: End of Life Care
This guide showcases UCD Library books on aspects of stages of parenting and caring for parents
Approaching end of Life
Nearing the end of life by
Before the Second World War few of us would have reached adolescence without someone loved dying at home. However tragic and unwelcome, death was accepted as part of life. In our modern, progressive world, death has been more or less hidden away in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices. Consequently, many people can be very fearful and completely unprepared to sit with a dying person, or understand the emotional and spiritual impact this can have on them. Nearing the End of Life is a practical guide to help relatives and friends to overcome their anxiety of the unknown. It explains what happens as someone enters their dying process, and describes the physical changes that occur when death is nearing. It also provides valuable advice about what the dying may need, how to open up difficult conversations, and what to expect when medical staff suggest that life-prolonging treatments need to be withdrawn. Finally, it offers guidance to those experiencing family feuds and grievances, and advice for friends on how best to support the dying person and their relatives.
2018
ISBN 1785452479
Call Number: 155.937BRA
With the end in mind - how to live and die well by
Told through a series of beautifully crafted stories taken from nearly four decades of clinical practice, her book answers the most intimate questions about the process of dying with touching honesty and humanity. She makes a compelling case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation but with openness, clarity and understanding.
With the End in Mind is a book for us all: the grieving and bereaved, ill and healthy. Open these pages and you will find stories about people who are like you, and like people you know and love. You will meet Holly, who danced her last day away; Eric, the retired head teacher who, even with Motor Neurone Disease, gets things done; loving, tender-hearted Nelly and Joe, each living a lonely lie to save their beloved from distress; and Sylvie, 19, dying of leukaemia, sewing a cushion for her mum to hug by the fire after she has died.
These are just four of the book’s thirty-odd stories of normal humans, dying normal human deaths. They show how the dying embrace living not because they are unusual or brave, but because that’s what humans do. By turns touching, tragic, at times funny and always wise, they offer us illumination, models for action, and hope. Read this book and you’ll be better prepared for life as well as death.
2019
ISBN 0008210918
Call Number: 306.9MAN
End of Life care
The Art of Dying Well by
A reassuring and thoroughly researched guide to maintaining a high quality of life--from resilient old age to the first inklings of a serious illness to the final breath--by the New York Times bestselling author of Knocking on Heaven's Door. The Art of Dying Well is about living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist and prominent end-of-life speaker Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life (even when coping with a chronic medical condition), how to get the best from our health system, and how to make your own "good death" more likely. This handbook of step by step preparations--practical, communal, physical, and sometimes spiritual--will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it decades, years, or months. Butler explains how to successfully age in place, why to pick a younger doctor and how to have an honest conversation with her, when not to call 911, and how to make your death a sacred rite of passage rather than a medical event. This down-to-earth manual for living, aging, and dying with meaning and even joy is based on Butler's own experience caring for aging parents, as well as hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated a fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths. It also draws on interviews with nationally recognized experts in family medicine, palliative care, geriatrics, oncology, hospice, and other medical specialties. Inspired by the medieval death manual Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying, The Art of Dying Well is the definitive update for our modern age, and illuminates the path to a better end of life.
2019
ISBN 1501135317
Call Number: 616.029BUT Also available as an eBook click on the title to access
Dying by
This book introduces a process-based, patient-centered approach to palliative care that substantiates an indication-oriented treatment and radical reconsideration of our transition to death. Drawing on decades of work with terminally ill cancer patients and a trove of research on near-death experiences, Monika Renz encourages practitioners to not only safeguard patients' dignity as they die but also take stock of their verbal, nonverbal, and metaphorical cues as they progress, helping to personalize treatment and realize a more peaceful death. Renz divides dying into three parts: pre-transition, transition, and post-transition. As we die, all egoism and ego-centered perception fall away, bringing us to another state of consciousness, a different register of sensitivity, and an alternative dimension of spiritual connectedness. As patients pass through these stages, they offer nonverbal signals that indicate their gradual withdrawal from everyday consciousness. This transformation explains why emotional and spiritual issues become enhanced during the dying process. Relatives and practitioners are often deeply impressed and feel a sense of awe. Fear and struggle shift to trust and peace; denial melts into acceptance. At first, family problems and the need for reconciliation are urgent, but gradually these concerns fade. By delineating these processes, Renz helps practitioners grow more cognizant of the changing emotions and symptoms of the patients under their care, enabling them to respond with the utmost respect for their patients' dignity.
2015
ISBN 9780231170888
Call Number: 616.029REN Also available as an eBook click on the title to access
The way we die now by
We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions.
This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahoney's thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.
2017
ISBN 1784974285
Call Number: 306.9OMA
Resources
- Hospice Foundation Ireland The Irish Hospice Foundation strives for the best care at end of life for these people and practical support for their loved ones.