36 pages • 1 hour read
Atul GawandeBeing Mortal: Illness, Medicine and what Matters in the End
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8-Epilogue
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter Eight Summary: “Courage”
When Jewel Douglass returns to the hospital, Gawande realizes that being Dr. Informative is not adequate. Instead of just offering options, he also needs to talk with her about her biggest fears and concerns. He needs to hear her goals and know what trade-offs she will make or avoid. In the end, Jewel Douglass is willing to undergo some surgery but no risky chances. She is able to return home again and dies in her sleep. The author’s father passes in the same way, after deciding that he wants to be medicated enough to not be wakeful when he goes.
Epilogue Summary
After his father’s passing, the author and his family travel to India to scatter his father’s ashes. As Gawande says his final goodbyes, he reflects on his deep admiration for his father. His father knew the limits of being human and lived with courage and acceptance within those limits. The author feels he is a better person and physician for all he’s taken from his father’s life and death.
Chapter 8-Epilogue Analysis
Gawande professes to be leery to suggesting that endings can be controlled. He recognizes the need for narcotics and sedatives and sometimes major interventions. He is concerned about what would happen if the medical field began assisting people with speeding up death. Yet he is not opposed to physicians helping patients out of end-of-life situations that have become unbearable and are unavoidable.
It is impossible to be fully prepared for the end, as the author learns first when his daughter’s beloved music teacher dies and then when his own father passes away. Gawande is able to convince Peg, his daughter’s piano teacher, to try hospice rather than hospital care so she is able to hold a final recital in which all her adoring students perform for her. Gawande’s father passes away surrounded by his family while made comfortable by medications that allow him to drift off to sleep. It is a request his father is able to make, and his family help have honored.
After his father’s passing, Gawande and his family travel to India to scatter his ashes. As he reflects on his father’s life, the author admires both his father’s determination and his father’s willingness to accept human mortality. It is a lesson the author knows that he and so many others need to learn. Gawande decides that some of his most profound moments as a physician have been assisting others when medicine cannot save them and together they learn what it means to be mortal.
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