It is a bitter-sweet reflection of a life well lived but one that is courageous enough to face the realities of life and the human condition. No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home. A refrain throughout the book is: "Just because a treatment can be given does not mean it should be given. This book reinforces all the things that we suspect about ageing which none of us really wants to own.

Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. This book was recommended and whilst I did find it interesting in parts, generally it's a tad sad and depressing ( as it would be given the subject matter) For me, the book lacked any spiritual depth. I am happy to talk on end of life decisions in the elderly, dementia prevention, the history of stroke disease, biological ageing or other topics covered in 33 Meditation on Death. We are all going to die, at some stage, and decisions we make will inform our declining years - from 25 years on. A mixture of reminiscences drawn from the author's family life and a long medical career and reflections on how to deal with death and dying.

I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. We all need to have conversation about what we want in the end and keep the conversation going with your family.

David Jarrett has been a doctor for forty years, thirty of which as an NHS consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine. I read this book over the course of one day and now I am passing it on to friends to read and discuss.I have a plan in the end and won't be left suffering more needlessly because of lacking a NDR directive. I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on. It’s fantastic - every chapter left me reflecting on my own life, what I would like for the people I love and what I hope my children will experience. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome. This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy.

Bursting with empathy, common sense and humour, would that we could all be so fortunate as to have the author at our bedside when the time comes. I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life. He is a clinician, teacher, examiner and former medical manager with extensive experience of frailty, death and dying and the modern world’s failure to confront the realities.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It is a very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family. It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying. Old age and the end of life are things that we need to prepare for and discuss with our family members.