End

With the End in Mind is one of the loveliest books I read near the end of the year.

For unknown reason the pattern of my reading follows an interesting flow: most of my recent ones are about the end of life, coinciding with the last few pages of the year calendar.

I just finished a heart-wrenching memoir of a young mother who died of colon cancer spreading everywhere in abdomen: The Unwinding of the Miracle.

It may seem odd that I set out to read those deathbed stories: a young drummer losing not just hair but her finger dexterity from the grueling leukaemia treatment, a couple who kept hiding the knowledge of terminal ovarian cancer from each other with both of them thinking that "I was the only one that knew." Yet those stories of patients in the last months of their lives have taught us to live better, as well as die better. That last bit is an important lesson for all.