{"product_id":"9780813549088","title":"Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make","description":"Today most people die gradually, from incremental illnesses, rather than from the heart attacks or fastmoving diseases that killed earlier generations. Given this new reality, the essays in \u003ci\u003eFinal Acts\u003c\/i\u003e explore how we can make informed and caring endoflife choices for ourselves and for those we love-and what can happen without such planning.\u003cp\u003eContributors 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 aidindying (assisted suicide).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWriting in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, donotresuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decisionmaking (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aidindying, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor those who yearn for some measure of control over death, the essayists in \u003ci\u003eFinal Acts,\u003c\/i\u003e from very different backgrounds and with different personal and professional experiences around death and dying, offer insight and hope.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rutgers University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47123901677808,"sku":"9780813549088","price":23.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780813549088_p0.jpg?v=1763743789","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780813549088","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}