How We Die: Reflections Of Life's Final Chapter,

runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner, Sherwin Nuland's How We Die has become the definitive text on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. This new edition includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the current state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. It also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.

Shewin Nuland's masterful How We Die is even more relevant than when it was first published.
On the back of "How We Die" Doris Lessing writes it's a must read for anyone over 50. I say anyone over 35. Because you might still have time then to internalise all the dying lessons Dr. Nuland has to teach, and you're past those forever twenties. 

We've got three score and ten years and most of that could be healthy, but after that, the remainder of our body life is borrowed and breaking down. Towards that end, Dr. Nuland urges us to measure quality of life against mechanical extensions of life, value peace of mind over medical miracles (because your surgeon sure as hell won't), and hold our connections with loved ones above everything. Live your life well, he says, because the end will probably not be pretty, and you want the people around you to remember everything else. 

Chapter by morbid chapter, and with intimate compassion and poetry, Dr. Nuland charts the major ways we die, all of which have to do with failures of oxygen supply, one way or another: heart attacks and strokes, old age, suicide, murder, accident, Alzheimers, AIDS and other viruses, cancer. The title alone was enough to give me (and everyone around me) pause, when I pulled the book out in public. 

We should all learn as much as we can about our bodies, their strengths, and their inevitable failings. It will help us deal more gracefully, or at least more knowingly, with the end. This book is as good a place as any to start.