As well as the stories and the "guide to dying" it is a good insight into palliative care and hospices generally; on what they do or hope to do. Her purpose is to describe many forms of death – the young man with testicular cancer treated in the room dubbed “the Lonely Ballroom”, the dying mother in the hospice who manages to walk her daughter up the aisle, the 22-year-old with cystic fibrosis, the teenager with leukaemia – and to show how in each case, while a death may be emotionally harrowing, it need not be intolerably painful; while it may be tragic, it need not be ghastly or full of the chaos that accompanies too many ends. Illuminating and beautiful … I shed a few tears but it’s not gut wrenching and Mannix weaves the light and dark strands of her experience with finesse.

As the hospice leader she's working with on Holly's case describes it to Holly's daughters: 'Have you noticed that she stops breathing from time to time? I have also shared it with friends who have family needing end-of-life care - knowing the trajectory of the journey stopped it being the unknown.Death and dying should no longer be a taboo issue in modern society, we should all have discussions with our loved ones about what-ifs and what our own wishes are.

There are lots of moving stories in here, extremely well written - and I'm sure that this doctor has done a lot of good things. By turns touching, tragic, at times funny and always wise, they offer us illumination, models for action, and hope. I tried to read it from a dual perspective, as a professional and academic in this field but also as a person inquisitive about their own death and those of my loved ones. It was a chapter about a dying person in Holland who felt he was pushed by his doctor into ending his life with euthanasia.This infuriated me because of the damage, pain and suffering the language of 'natural birth' and the doctrine of little medical intervention has caused to women and their babies. The book is unique in giving a doctor’s perspective but telling the stories of patients and their families, so we see a whole range of emotions and attitudes: denial, anger, regret, fear and so on. It’s clear she feels she’s been honored to work with the dying, and she’s helped to propagate a healthy approach to death.

By turns touching and tragic, funny and wise, With the End in Mind brings together Kathryn Mannix ’ s lifetime of medical experience to tell powerful stories of life and death. There is a Pause for Thought moment at the end of each chapter where there are suggestions and practical details are discussed. They have all been of interest and informed me to some degree whether they illustrate personal stories or look at the bigger picture. This book contains a lot of personal stories, all different in the same way that we are all different people. If you are wired so that you think there's grandeur, learning, redemption, or whatever other "quality" in suffering except pointless pain, you are going to stand your ground and use this book to reinforce your rationalizations about why the pain (physical suffering) is unavoidable, even necessary part of human experience.I shed a few tears but it s not gut wrenching and Mannix weaves the light and dark strands of her experience with finesse.