TY - BOOK ID - 78141079 TI - Final acts AU - Maglin, Nan Bauer AU - Perry, Donna Marie PY - 2010 SN - 1280492465 9786613587695 0813549086 9780813549088 9780813546278 0813546273 9780813546285 0813546281 9781280492464 6613587699 PB - New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press DB - UniCat KW - Thanatology. KW - Death. KW - Death KW - Dying KW - End of life KW - Life KW - Terminal care KW - Terminally ill KW - Thanatology KW - Cardiac Death KW - Determination of Death KW - End Of Life KW - End-Of-Life KW - Near-Death Experience KW - Death, Cardiac KW - Fatal Outcome KW - Philosophy UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78141079 AB - Today most people die gradually, from incremental illnesses, rather than from the heart attacks or fast-moving diseases that killed earlier generations. Given this new reality, the essays in Final Acts explore how we can make informed and caring end-of-life choices for ourselves and for those we loveĆ¹and what can happen without such planning. Contributors include patients, caretakers, physicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers, educators, hospital administrators, academics, psychologists, and a poet, and among them are ethicists, religious believers, and nonbelievers. Some write moving, personal accounts of "good" or 'bad" deaths; others examine the ethical, social, and political implications of slow dying. Essays consider death from natural causes, suicide, and aid-in-dying (assisted suicide). Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying, treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends, caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government. For those who yearn for some measure of control over death, the essayists in Final Acts, from very different backgrounds and with different personal and professional experiences around death and dying, offer insight and hope. ER -