Ars Moriendi in the 21st Century

Dr. Katherine McKenzie, an internist at Yale, describes how she and her family allowed her father to experience “a good death” based on an older philosophy called the “Art of Dying.  See “A Modern Ars Moriendi” (New England Journal of Medicine, June 2, 2016)

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes (2013)

On the most important level this a meditation on Barnes’ grief.  The chapter,

‘The Loss of Depth’, which comprises around half of the book’s length, is Barnes’ examination of his grief after the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh.  It is candid to the point that when he moots the idea of suicide he reveals his preferred method (‘a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife').

In ‘The Loss of Depth’ the love story is entwined in the narrative of grieving rather than parenthetically set aside, and entanglement this is the heart of the book.  There are many books in this genre, some on this blog.