That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“A profound exploration of what it means for all of us to live—and to die—with dignity and purpose.” —People
 
“Visceral and lyrical.” —The Atlantic

As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine--a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.

Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

• The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
• Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
• A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
• When All Is Said: A Novel
• With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
• Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
• Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
• Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
• The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care