Author : Atul
Gawande M.D
Publisher : Henry
Colt and Co.
Publishing Year : 2014.
Review : 4 of 5
Stars.
This book was the second (English) book that I have read.
The first one : “Steve Jobs”. So, both of them can be categorize as a
non-fiction one. Although many engineering books classified as a non-fiction
one (and I like to read them). Reading a biography-type and a book that I don’t
know much about the topic is yet another challenge to accomplish. Feel bore ?,
not particularly, a bit feeling stranded when I try to finish it ?, Surely.
Enough with the mumbling. Back to the topic.
Being Mortal is about what will happens to human body
when it goes to the condition of what so called : “Terminary-ill”. For someone
that had their age, being more closely to the death but not yet to die will go
under condition that quite much devastating to deal with. Slowly but sure the
physical body lose their ability one way or another. The cause could be of the
aging, but much of them are the combination of many reasons such as
hard-disease and improperly treatment of the disease itself. They are not only
damaging our physical immune system, but also inflicting our mentality.
Mr. Atul open this book with an introduction about the
comparison of death in the past and nowadays (pretty much scary huh ? talking
about death -_-“). On the essence, the book not only taught us about what is
going on when we’re aging, but also how human face them with a social-help. Mr.
Atul gives many example case in the American history about the ‘Hospice care’.
Hospice care is a place to (say) the elders gather and get an appropriate treatment
depend on its physical and mental condition. How to maintain individual skill
by the help of others (social part) but without feeling surrender. Why we need
hospice care ?, because when we’re aged
and nobody surround us, we still want to be independent. We want to do many
activities as when we’re young. Unlike in many developing countries (such in
Asia, India and Indonesia are one of them) that have High-dense population, which
one family could have a lot members, living in modern country, with a
low-mortality and many young people going old for so long require a different
trick to deal with.
At the end, Mr. Atul generalized that what matters most
when we’re on the ‘terminary-ill’ is not about how to deal with the death
itself. Either human delay it by medicine or any particular action such as
surgery and so on. Instead, what we want to achieve on the small increment of
our very last time. We, as a human, want a good-ending of our story. When the
curtain close, we don’t want to leave our close people with somekind of
bad-show, we want to give a very best of ours to them so they can appreciate
our show with such a standing ovation instead. How to make that happen ? one
way that Mr. Atul shows to the reader is by doing a ‘hard-conversation’. May
for many people in developing countries, such as here in Indonesia, talking
about the death with the one that we know they can not survive is such a taboo
one. Our culture usually shows dying-people call to the one they want to talk
and leave them with sort of ‘prophecy’ for the future. Mr. Atul and his father
(whom also a doctor) use a hard-conversation to know exactly what his father
wants when the time comes.
As from ‘ordinary’ people perspective. I gave this book 4
from 5 stars of mine. Mr. Atul is such a brave one to bring up the topic that
unusual. He also taught the reader with such a lot of example history and
medicine which could be use when we’re aged. What should reader worry of this
book is not because the book pretty much talking about ‘death’, but because
this book has limited experience only from America (or such a modern-country I
would say). So, how to deal with our very last time might be slightly differ
when we take a look on another place in the world (say, developing country with
many people still hard to access health-care properly).
