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  • The Best Way to Say Goodbye: A Legal Peaceful Choice at the End of Life
  • Fatina Abdrabboh, MPP, MTS (bio)
The Best Way to Say Goodbye: A Legal Peaceful Choice at the End of Life. Stanley A. Terman, PhD, MD. Carlsbad, CA: Life Transitions Publications (1st ed.): January 12, 2008. 489 pp.

Policymakers and health care professionals have often bemoaned the fact that many Americans have are unaware of their rights as patients. As the research by Dr. Stanley Terman demonstrates in The Best Way to Say Goodbye: A Legal Peaceful Choice at the End of Life, nowhere, perhaps, is the need for education more urgent than in the realm of end-of-life care. Anticipated increases in Alzheimers and other dementias are likely to coincide with shortages in the number of working and caregiving nurses. Important nurse-intensive health care options—including end-of-life care—are teetering towards the brink of extinction. Terman argues that unless the attitudes of Americans and policymakers undergo major changes, society will be unable to meet the tremendous challenge that these shortages will likely generate. Terman ccharacterizes his work as a comprehensive "strategic plan" (p. 37) that instructs individuals on how to control the manner with which their lives end. The book provides policymakers the necessary information to rethink issues central to how people might end their lives based on their "life-long values and preferences" (p. 14).

Although Dr. Terman, a psychiatrist by training, expresses his professional opinion throughout the book, he does so carefully, leaving the reader to form his or her own opinion. Terman exhaustively cites research studies of patients and the important clinical observations reported by experienced physicians and nurses. He seeks to address the issue of end-of-life care head-on by living, eating, drinking, and breathing the role of the dying patient. Prior to writing this book, Terman spent four days "voluntarily refusing all food and fluid" (p. 8) in order to experience personally the intimate and intricate details of dying from the vantage point of the patient. Ultimately, he concluded that "dying from dehydration can be not only comfortable but peaceful" (p. 9) and that dry-mouth aids and other supportive measures not only helped eliminate the sense of thirst, but made the experience comfortable.

The Best Way to Say Goodbye is at once scholarly and fueled by the author's attention to details. In addition to referring to dozens of studies, articles, and religious texts, his formidable storytelling ability helps make an otherwise technical and possibly maudlin subject seem engaging and stimulating. It is the author's hope that patients and policymakers will see that this book "presents the details of how to accomplish" (p. 29) a peaceful method of "benefit[ing] the lives" (p. 346) of "rich and poor alike" (p. 337) regardless of how reluctant they are to "discuss their end-of-life wishes" (p. 14). [End Page 749]

Fatina Abdrabboh

Fatina Abdrabboh is a student at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and can be reached at fatina@post.harvard.edu.

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