Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

Rachel Clarke manages to approach a sensitive subject with grace and understanding. The urgent call to love and appreciate being alive despite pain, grief and loss is vividly expressed through personal stories about what lead Clarke to become a palliative care doctor.Reading this book has made me feel more alive and "tuned in" to what is most important: connection with and care for those around me. I am deeply grateful to the author for sharing her insites into this important topic.

My youngest son was diagnosed with stage 4 small cell lung cancer one year ago. I have become obsessed with reading about death and dying. This book reassured a lot of my fears about what we might experience and ways we can choose to deal with it. I recommend this book to anyone who is facing losing a loved one.

Dr. Clarke's insights were profoundly transformative. She takes the dreadful edge off of the inevitable, explaining how being near death can allow one to rejoice in being very much alive.

This book will change your perspective. I never really understood things when my dad was in hospice. I feel so much better about the process now. It helps me understand the changes my mom in law is going through now in hospice care. These people are angels. Their compassionate grace in the face of such grief is heartwarming and welcome. I feel she is truly cared about as well as cared for.Definitely a recommended read.

Clarke is an excellent writer. The story flowed easily and the writing was very descriptive. I recently suffered a loss. This book described -as if she was in the room - the sadness and reactions my family had.There were many times in the reading of this that I cried. That I could barely breath. I know this is mainly nearly loss is still raw. But it is true that it is in part the quality and sensitivity of her writing.Well done and highly recommended!

I had to sip this book, like wine. It didn’t need aging. It needed processing and appreciating. The writing was lovely, but the glimpse into the beauty which surrounds death was breathtaking, aching, and lovely. It should be on every book club list.

i found this book to be extremely interesting. i have always felt it takes a very special person to be with those that are dying, and yet i have always heard nothing but praise for Hospice workers. To me, because I have been diagnosed with a terminal disease, I found this to be very encouraging, inciteful and enlightening.

Dr Clarke writes so eloquently, so wisely as she shares her own development as a doctor, her choice to specialize in palliative care, and the journey her own family took as her father reached the end of his life. This is a box-of-tissues book, in a good way, and I only wish that everyone could receive the kind of end of life care Dr Clarke and her team give.

I simply couldn't put this book down. Beautifully written, brimming with compassion and care, Rachel's patients are very lucky to have her by their side.

I was recommended to read this by a friend before starting work at a hospice and am so glad I did. It is very well-written, as one might expect from a journalist turned palliative care doctor, but more than that I felt I got a felt sense of what working in palliative care might be like. I found the descriptions of several deaths, all much less bleak and frightening than I had imagined, strangely comforting.

Wow. What an incredibly profound and moving read; I don't even know where to start with my review of <i>Dear Life </i> because I just know that whatever I say will not do it justice.This was definitely an emotional read; at many times throughout this book the tears were streaming down my face (which was a bit awkward when I had a work meeting in the next half hour) because it is such an emotive and insightful read. Rachel works in hospice; and I think we can all say that our understanding of hospices are so wrong. I honestly thought, as many of Rachel's patients do, that they are the places people go to die. That when you go in you won't come out alive again. So it was really interesting to read about what hospices actually do, and what they could achieve given the proper funding.Rachel is a Doctor who clearly has a lot of compassion and empathy for all the people she works with; she wants them to be more than just numbers or figures but actually names and faces and the stories of their lives. This really comes across on the pages and it makes you warm to Rachel and empathise even more with all the people she has cared for over the years.I think this is such an important book because it focuses on not being scared of dying, but being scared of living at the end of your days. So many of Rachel's patients know that they are dying but they don't just give up, they are determined to carry on living for as long as they can and it is just incredibly inspiring; from the young bride who is determined to have her big wedding to the grandfather who wants to reach his grandson's birthday.Rachel intersperses the book with patient stories, details about her own journey to become a Doctor, and about her GP father, who sadly was diagnosed with cancer and put Rachel into the shoes of the families she saw everyday. It was definitely a hard read at times but I was just hooked by the stories and the writing and i'm so glad I randomly decided to pick this one up. It's definitely a book that will stay with me for a long time and the stories of the patients and Rachel's father, who in the face of death, just fought for one more moment with the ones they love and the things they loved doing.

Combining compassion with a medical doctor's understanding of the condition of patients already at the end of their lives, Clark offers many examples of how one can give them a peaceful death and a chance to communicate and say goodbye to their loved ones. She is also a gifted writer, able to impart deep insights into the human psyche with literary flourish.

The book gives a good understanding of the typical changes as a person proceeds towards death. I met Dr. Rachel Clarke whilst visiting the hospice where my wife was staying in the last weeks of her life. The doctor helped a lot then and her book does likewise. I recommend it.