Death is a medical failure.

There are moments in medicine when what you say next feels as pregnant with risk as a surgeon’s first incision.

I worked fast.

Clarke recounts a conversation with an exhausted colleague who patrols those corridors, looking for people who might warrant a rare bed in the intensive care ward – this, in the world’s sixth richest economy.

“I like to know when he’s visiting so I can have a sleep beforehand.” “I didn’t realise that, Dad,” said Sophie.

• Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). Biography & autobiography: business & industry, Biography & autobiography: arts & entertainment, Biography & autobiography: historical, political & military, Biography & autobiography: science & technology, Biography & autobiography: religious & spiritual, Language teaching & learning (other than ELT), Modern history to 20th century: c1700 to c1900, Children's & YA poetry, anthologies & annuals, The Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2020, The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2020, Skip to the beginning of the images gallery. Saul Bellow wrote that death is “the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything”: it gives life its value and time its precious meaning.

We use cookies to enhance your visit to us. 'A magnificent, tender book' Independent 'Her words are brimful of love, grace and kindness' Guardian 'She writes with a tender, lyrical beauty' Sunday Times From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Your Life in My Hands comes this vibrant, tender and deeply personal memoir that finds light and love in the darkest of places. All Rights Reserved.

What in palliative care needs most urgently to change?The little-known, outrageous funding situation. Can’t even get up the stairs now.”, “That loss of energy gradually worsens. . I can help your pain with morphine but if you are spasming with grief that your children are going to grow up without their mother, I cannot palliate that. So often, so reliably, I witness people rising to their best, on facing the worst.

But occasionally – far less frequently than people imagine – even the best palliative medicine cannot take away pain. There was to be no well-earned peace in the countryside for Simon. Patients can find it helps to try and plan in advance a bit, saving up their energy for the things that really matter.”, “Like Timmy,” Simon interrupted. And equally, in medicine, in every conceivable way, the human story matters.

This is it.

If Simon was about to die, I reasoned, none of this paraphernalia was going to prevent that.

Dear Life by Rachel Clarke.

I understand that from the inside out, grief, like love, is non-negotiable, and that the only way to avoid the pain is to opt out of ever loving. And this gave you a new take on your work in the hospice?I needed that education about grief as a human being and as a doctor. I thought of my own toddler, safe at nursery, and of the magnitude of the horror with which Gemma’s mother, sequestered in a relatives’ room, must now be seized. And the passages in her book that made me want to weep were not the ones about dying, but the ones about living, loving, learning how to say goodbye. “All those years of medical training, I now know, have singularly failed to equip me with proper insight into the magnitude of other people’s grief.” Working in palliative care is not, as some assume, a depressing job – “nothing could be further from the truth”. Browse The Guardian Bookshop for a big selection of Biography & autobiography: science & technology books and the latest boo Buy Dear Life 9780349143934 by Rachel Clarke for only £9.29 • Gavin Francis’s Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession is out in May.

Under the Blair/Brown governments, it was a whopping 6%.

You stop feeling hungry and you don’t want to eat. I bit my lip to keep tears at bay. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. We all love being with you, especially Timmy.”.

Thank you, Rachel – I mean it.”, So often, so reliably, I witness people rising to their best on fac­ing the worst. It was impossible to hear the paramedics’ handover above the screams of Gemma’s mother. Talking about this issue should be part of medical education.

We all know we are a spark, a little flash in the pan and will be obliterated before we know it. She fell into a canal,” said a senior nurse. “Simon, are you the kind of person who likes to discuss everything frankly,” I began, “or do you prefer to take things one day at a time, without speculating about the future?” “I already know I’m dying,” he responded.

How, I wondered, could someone be so aghast at their weakness while behaving with such unseen strength? In an adult, the risk of brain damage is high, but Gemma’s youth gave her body resilience. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. A patient finds they are sleeping nearly all of the time.

Fifteen, 20 minutes must have passed.


A dying man had looked his end in the eye – all of it, the worst of it, potential suffocation – and yet, in that moment of profound mortal reckoning, with every single thing he loved slipping from his grasp, had found within himself the strength to look outwards, towards what mattered more than anything: the human beings he loved. We are all far too busy doing our jobs, often with time running out. All rights reserved. • Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss, by Rachel Clarke, is published by Little, Brown on 30 January. I don’t understand how Boris Johnson can allow this to continue.

Dimly, I clock how bright the man’s blood is, and that his leg, neatly severed, lies on the ground beside him.” Slowly she picked herself up and staggered off between the casualties, still deafened by the blast. When I started, the NHS was the recipient of the 6% funding and things were so different.

Dear Life is a book about the vital importance of human connection, by the doctor we would all want by our sides at a time of crisis. Bird food and beer might not seem revolutionary, but when I arrived here, seven years after starting life as a doctor, they signalled something thrillingly radical.

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