If you learn how to die, you’ll learn how to live

April 29, 2015 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End

By Atul Gawande

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2014.

Review by Kerry Cue

Atul Gawande

The reason this book is so meaningful, so compelling and why it ranks as a rare must-read is because, in telling the story of how to die a good death, it slowly addresses an equally important question namely ‘how are we to live a good and meaningful life?’

Atul Gawande, surgeon and writer for The New Yorker, dreams of new ways of caring for the frail and old. He questions the bureaucratic nature of aged care institutions where the elderly are kept ‘safe’, but hardly ‘alive’. And he rails against the invasive, painful and ultimately futile medical procedures inflicted on the dying. Yet this book is no dry academic tome. Gawande tells the storxy of dying and death of his father, also a surgeon, from first discovering the tumor in the spinal column, through the family’s struggling with medical options – operate? His father might become a quadriplegic. Don’t operate, he may become a quadriplegic! – to his father’s final days.

There is one strong and clear message from this thoughtful exploration of the end stage. Patients could have good days even when dying. But to achieve this goal they must be asked, or think about, at least, ‘what are your greatest fears?’ and ‘what are your current goals?’ Simple questions but from the answers patients discover how they are to live in their final days and, eventually, die.

Gawande has managed to take the fear away from our modern, Western view of dying, which, in many aspects involves, an impersonal, sterile, ICU bed intubated with a tube down the throat and a total loss of control. Dying need not be like this. Gawande shows how the human spirit can flourish and life can be fully lived to the very end.

Photo source: Unsourced book review blog, Tapestry held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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NO WIFI: What can we do grandma?

January 5, 2015 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

by The Sibyls

Two thoughts for the New Year:

1. You can never have too much fun.

2. Life was funny, so funny, before wifi,

but you had to be there.

Last Child in the Woods

June 25, 2014 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

REVIEW by Kerry Cue

Last Child in the Woods:

Saving our children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Richard Louv

Atlantic Books, 2005

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We are the generations, who roamed free. We rode our bikes unsupervised. Explored the neighbourhood. Played in the street. We poked around creeks, ditches, anthills and gum tree forests. We built tree houses and forts. Or, if we were city dwellers, we played on building sites, on vacant blocks and in playgrounds fitted with cold-steel swings and maypoles that could crack a head or take out a tooth.

Our grandchildren live indoors.

In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv meticulously records the relocation of children out of nature and into lounge rooms where they are exposed to the ‘one-way experience of television and other electronic media’.

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‘For some young people nature is so abstract – the ozone layer, a faraway rainforest- that it exists beyond the senses.’

‘Neither children nor wild life have been of much concern to urban planners in recent decades … public spaces have become increasingly domesticated, flat, lawyered, and boring’. In Pennsylvania three brothers, aged eight, ten and twelve, were forced to tear down their tree house in the backyard because they didn’t have a building permit!

According to Louv, it is not just the loss of interaction with nature that is of concern, but also the total loss of sensory experiences. At a time when child obesity, ADHD and other disorders are rife, we deprive children of the ‘physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play’.

‘The young don’t demand dramatic adventures or vacations in Africa. They need only a taste, a sight, a sound, a touch … to reconnect that receding world of the senses’.

Parents are often too busy to even think about nature. But we know what it is like to explore the neighbourhood. We can take our grandchildren into natural environments to pick up a rock, a stick or, simply, dig for earthworms in the garden. How Lilly Pilly Jam can save your life shows one way of involving grandchildren in both gardening and community activities.

There are many ways we can take them outdoors and show them the amazing reality beyond their digital screens.