By Mark Savan

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, my personal journey regarding end-of-life Options began in 2016 when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  One of the most helpful things for me in the beginning of that process was reading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I found the book to be extraordinarily helpful to me in getting my head around death and dying and gave me a great framework to think about how I could help my dad to manage his dying process. More recently, I read Anita Hannig’s The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America. As I wrote about in our July 2023 newsletter, Ms. Hannig does a great job of telling the stories of patients, caregivers, and family members who were involved in utilizing Medical Aid in Dying.

I know that many of us have found books like this to be helpful and, over the years, AZELO has compiled a reading list of topical books about death, dying, and end of life options. During the past month we have taken two steps to bring more light to these books. First, we have initiated a series of book reviews—starting with this month’s review by AZELO supporter Marcia Vincent. Second, we have transformed our reading list into a “bookstore” on the AZELO website. In addition to a list of books and reviews, we have included links to purchase the books through Amazon. When you purchase a book through one of these links, AZELO gets a portion of the purchase price as a donation, and you will not pay any more for the book than you would directly through Amazon. Thank you to AZELO’s Secretary David Brandt-Erichsen for setting up our Bookstore.

Please click here to visit the AZELO Bookstore … here to purchase Being Mortal … or here to purchase The Day I Die…

I’m very grateful to Marcia Vincent for many reasons—most recently for being the first person to do an AZELO book review. You will find her review of In Love elsewhere in this newsletter. I’d also like to thank Helen Barker for volunteering to review a book for this initiative. Ultimately, Helen felt that the book that she read was not appropriate for our purposes, but she was very thoughtful in her review and consideration of the material and very generous with her time.

We hope to make this a regular feature and I’d love to have someone organize and run this program. If you are interested in volunteering to run our book review program please click here to send me an email.