Things Worse Than Death

Description

Spoiler alert: We are all going to die. Most of us imagine it will be like in the movies: surrounded by family and friends; some parting words of wisdom; one final, gentle sigh. But dying isn't always like this. Sometimes, despite the best that modern medicine can throw at it, it can be savage beyond belief. Andrew Denton first discovered this thirty years ago when he watched his father, Kit, die. It was, he says, 'the most shocking experience of my life', one that has left he and his sisters with scars unhealed. A few years ago, Andrew read an article about the death of someone else's father in Holland. Dying of cancer, Hugo Pos was allowed, under that country's euthanasia laws, to set the time and manner of his own death. Before the brutality of his disease took him apart, Hugo was able to farewell those he loved in the way that he wished before doctors ended his suffering in the gentlest way imaginable. Andrew wanted to know: Why can't we help dying people like that here? For the last two years, he's travelled Australia and the world, gathering information from those for and those against assisted dying. He talked to doctors, nurses, priests, lawyers, ethicists, politicians and surgeons. He sat with the dying, and their families. He gathered the stories of those who had borne witness to terrible deaths. At the end he was left touched by the resilience of the human spirit and angered by the cruelty parading as compassion expressed by some in the church, the medical profession, and Australia's parliaments. In Things Worse Than Death, Andrew Denton shares the personal stories of courage and despair, the moral arguments for and against assisted dying, and takes you inside the harsh realities that dictate the politics of death. This book will break your heart, make you angry and, most of all, it will ask you to you think about the unthinkable: Your own death and how you want it to be.