The Quality of Life: Living Well, Dying Well - Softcover

When Janet Lembke's mother was a sprightly seventy-eight years old, she had made her daughter promise to help her die when the time came: pills with a stiff Bloody Mary and a hug. But when that time came many years later, it was not so simple. Her mother had had a series of strokes that had rendered her incapable of rational thought, and Lembke couldn't, in fact, help her mother die. Watching her mother suspended in a life that wasn't really living prompted Lembke to wonder what could be done. How do we deal with life's end? How best may those of us who have our wits about us care for old, frail people whose minds are lost forever in the shadows? This book is a result of her quest for answers, of impeccable research into the world of caregiving to the dying.
She examines death by choice - suicide, assisted and otherwise; advanced medical directives; the bioethics of chasing death down by withdrawal of life support; dementia and how a caregiver may cope with it; hospice; and the quality of life. The eponymous chapter explores ways to determine quality and discovers objective criteria. Lembke interviewed many people and tells their stories. Among them are two women who helped a mother die, a rabbi, a priest, a Muslim bioethicist, and a man, survivor of not one but two kidney transplants, who worked with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The book concludes with a list of resources, like the Alzheimer's Association, The Stroke Network, and Life Line, a device for summoning help. Notes and a bibliography follow the resource list.

Janet Lembke writes and gardens in Staunton, Virginia. The Quality of Life springs from her experiences, during her mother's long downhill slide after suffering two major strokes, with the end-of-life issues that we all need to deal with. She now leads well-attended workshops that help people stay in charge of their lives. She has written seventeen other books, many of them about aspects of the natural world-birds, trees, water, gardens. She has also translated Latin and Greek classics. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts supported her translation of Virgil's Georgics, a 2000-year-old poem about farming.