The Best Way to Say Goodbye: A Legal Peaceful Choice At the End of Life
A comprehensive, insightful, and surprisingly entertaining guide through the maze of end-of-life decisions. It calms our greatest fear: that complete strangers can intrude on our most intimate decisions, and worse make decisions that we would not make for ourselves. Dr. Terman offers a close to ironclad strategy to preserve control at the end of life, even for those individuals who may ultimately suffer from severe brain damage or dementia. Every pitfall has been considered and solved! It also guides families through the chaos that results from inadequate advance care planning. This book is so good that our organization keeps copies at every office. It is a mainstay of the recommendations we provide our clients. --Barbara Coombs Lee, PA, FNP, JD; CEO of Compassion & Choices; Chief Petitioner for Oregon s Death with Dignity ActDr. Stanley Terman has provided a very insightful analysis of the President's Council on Bioethics' report,Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving In Our Aging Society. His detailed suggestions for wording Advance Directives are very important.  While it may be Utopian to hope, as Dr. Terman proposes, that governmental  agencies (such as motor vehicle departments) might require individuals to complete Advance Directives, it would be a major improvement over our presentlaissez fairepolicy of ignoring this issue. I am very supportive of responsible strategies to encourage individuals to complete such documents. The book's final story,She Revised her Advance Directives from 16 to 86, clearly illustrates how our views can change as we age and mature, and as our situation changes. Clearly, we need to update our Advance Directives on a regular basis. --Janet D. Rowley, MD, DSc; President s Council on Bioethics member; Albert Lasker Clinical Medicine Research Prize recipientPeople think if they do not die instantaneously in a car accident or from a heart attack, they are going to be caught between two undesirable options--either to be attached to machines for a very long time, often in a state of unconsciousness with no reasonable hope for recovery, or, at the other extreme, to commit suicide or get someone to murder you so that you can end it all more quickly. In a wise, medically well-grounded, and even witty book, Dr. Terman explores the middle course:  refusing tube feeding and hydration --Elliot N. Dorff, Rabbi, PhD; Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Judaism; author of Matters of Life and Death