Being Mortal Documentary Summary

End of Life care

This important documentary does not come close to doing justice to Gawande 's video: Being Mortal. The book is rich with excellent examples of doctors, nurses and family members doing their level best assisting others to live the fullest and richest lives possible right up until and including the very end of their lives. As Dr. Atul Gawande would say, the point isn 't to strive for a good death but rather to have the best possible life that is congruent with one 's own values; and to make medical decisions and choices accordingly. By living each day in harmony with one 's goals and values, one is likely to have a good death. Modern medical advances have lengthened the human life span, such that it is now longer than it has been at any point in human history. These advances happened alongside the

Death and attendant matters have been seminal topics of reflection, disputatious debate, and other modes of social discourse since the dawn of civilization and, presumably, also among the people who predate civilization. The sociology of death was now an accepted specialty area, but the growth and development of a hematological literature in this specialty continued to be very much an interdisciplinary effort, and it was still difficult to disentangle the sociological enterprise from that of other behavioral sciences. Moreover, Dying patients and their family members today also may use the time period between diagnosis and death to ensure that the memory of the decedent will persist after loss. The notion that the dying process may be used as a time to assert one’s identity was first set forth in Death and Identity, where Robert Fulton (1965) argued that ‘‘preserving rather than losing...personal identity’’ is a critical aspect of the dying process. Victor Marshall (1980) subsequently proposed that heightened awareness of one’s impending death trig- gears increased self-reflection, reminiscence, and the conscious construction of a coherent personal