33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

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David Jarrett’s 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. This book was recommended and whilst I did find it interesting in parts, generally it's a tad sad and depressing ( as it would be given the subject matter) For me, the book lacked any spiritual depth. Like many lapsed Catholics the author is sometimes guilty of imagining that a Roman Catholic understanding of how to respond to death and what religion means is the only valid (but wrong) way of being religious.

Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying. Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. A refrain throughout the book is: "Just because a treatment can be given does not mean it should be given.

I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on. I’ve recommended this book to so many and my parents have read this as a result (and also loved it)!

I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life. I work in the NHS myself in psychology and really liked the author’s musings on how much society might over-medicalise or over-treat.

It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share. I am happy to talk on end of life decisions in the elderly, dementia prevention, the history of stroke disease, biological ageing or other topics covered in 33 Meditation on Death.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This book will be helpful to anyone with ageing parents or people like myself who are old but not yet elderly.It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome. I have a plan in the end and won't be left suffering more needlessly because of lacking a NDR directive.