Your Good Death

“Healthcare generally means well, but it doesn’t always do well. This is especially true and consequential towards the end of life. Too often what is a sacred experience gets reduced to a medical flowchart, so insidiously and counterintuitively so that we patients are left questioning ourselves and our own sense of reality, adding a sense of tragedy to an already fraught mix. Enter Karen’s book, a perfect blend of her decades of scholarship and the power of story. Your Good Death will help you make sense of your experience as well as help you advocate for anyone you love, someday including yourself. It’s just what this doctor would order.” – BJ Miller, MD, author of A Beginner’s Guide to the End
“Karen Lutfey Spencer combines expertise in health policy with a true love of storytelling to help readers visualize a path towards the healthcare they want and deserve.” – Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH, filmmaker and author of Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
“Your Good Death is a wise and compassionate guide for navigating end-of-life care, helping readers face difficult decisions with intention. It will make you pause and think about your own personal story, what matters for you, and what you need to think about as you move through the increasingly complex world of modern medical care in the United States.” – Diane Button, author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living
“This book is for all of us who will die one day. In a health care system with a strong drive towards treatment and cure, Dr. Spencer explains through heartfelt stories how it is up to us to navigate around the insurance obstacles and professional gaps to achieve the death we desire. She nudges us to make requests about palliative and hospice care, ask the hard questions about quality of life, and close our final chapter with grace. Our doctors will not help us if we don’t ask for help first, but a good death, whatever it may be, is in reach for everyone.” – Stefan Timmermans, PhD, co-author of The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels
“If you have aging parents, but palliative care, hospice, and caregiving are still hypothetical concepts, it’s time to lock in and read this book. Everyone’s end of life experience will be better for it.” – Caitlin Doughty, author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory
“Spencer’s end-of-life research, interviews, and options are a must planning-read for anyone of a ‘certain age.’” – Phil Caragol, author of the Baby Boom memoir, The Blunder Years

Karen Lutfey Spencer is a medical sociologist and professor of health and behavioral sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research on doctor-patient relationships, medical decision making, and healthcare inequality has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals for over twenty-five years. She has been featured in The New York Times, NBC News, New York Magazine’s The Cut, and public radio outlets, among others. Dr. Spencer received her undergraduate degree from Gustavus Adolphus College and graduate degrees from Indiana University Bloomington. She lives near the foothills in Littleton, Colorado with her husband, blue heeler, and far too many bicycles. Your Good Death is her first book.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.