Dear Life

A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

By: Rachel Clarke

Narrated by: Rachel Clarke

"Rachel Clarke's authentic narration achieves the most important thing in audio production. It allows the author's humanity to shine and her written words to be transformed into a moving listening experience...Whether end-of-life medicine is one of your interests or not, this audiobook will deepen your connection with others and your deepest self." (AudioFile Magazine)

In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end.

This program is read by the author.

Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters.

In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He'd inspired her to become a doctor, and the stories he had told her as a child proved formative when it came to deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter.

Dear Life follows how Rachel came to understand - as a child, as a doctor, as a human being - how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice.

A Macmillan Audio production from Thomas Dunne Books

©2020 Rachel Clarke (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Doctors

As a primary care physician I found this very inspiring. Every doctor should read this.

I needed this

In the throws of grief losing my father to cancer, this helped me so much. Gave voice to all that I felt and am feeling. I needed all the stories of life and loss, and the story of this author. Thank you

Meaningful and authentic

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you so much for writing your story

Honest and moving

Throughout the book I found myself sometimes laughing and other times holding back tears. Clark does a great job at articulating the different lessons about living that we can draw from death.