This is a very honest and emotional memoir.
It looks at death and how you can die. It looks at hospice care.
A book that everyone should read

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read this book. Another that I commend to those starting out in the medical profession - it had me in tears in places. It is not all gloom but it does point out that there are those in the profession who think theirs is the only opinion and only choice on offer, which we know is not the case if we push hard enough against it. Rachel guides us through events which many of us will experience one way or another, when I reached the end of the book I felt peaceful and calm. I think this book teaches us what we already know - we all have choices, it is up to us how we spend them.

What a truly heartwarming book. Yes it was upsetting, but not in an awful way, but a truly inspiring way.
I found it uplifting and I can imagine that anyone who has recently lost someone, or someone whose life is ebbing away, as happens to all of us, that this wonderfully, poignant book would be.

What a wonderful book.

This book was a difficult but good read, showing the compassion of those who work in end of life care, in hospices, care homes and hospitals. I found it both uplifting and upsetting to see how the author's personal life overlapped with that of her professional life. This is a book full of humanity that unashamedly stares death in the face and shows that a 'good death' can be possible with the right care.

I have read Rachel Clarke's earlier book about being a junior doctor and found it enjoyable and enlightening.
This book also does not disappoint.
A realistic and honest account of caring for those individuals who may be on the palliative care pathway. You may imagine that this is a sad subject and it is at points, but also a very beautiful tribute to the individuals that this lady has cared for. This is also a very lovely tribute to her father and his commitment to the NHS.
This book is recommended to all, not just those who work in healthcare.
Made me cry, smile and thankful to experience the tales of some the individuals described in this book.
Thank you to Rachel Clarke, the publisher and NetGalley to allowing me to read in return for a review.

Devastating, uplifting, informative and generally brilliant.

There aren’t many books that I give 5 stars to but this is one of them. As we learn about Rachel’s early years in medicine and why her passion became palliative care we are also given a glimpse into a personal heartbreak, the loss of her father, from cancer. Where does doctoring stop and daughtering start?!?

We learn of the truly holistic care provided in hospice settings. Movie night, pets are welcome, free massage, weddings, and sex with your partner if that is what you would like to do. The stories told within are, of course, poignant and tinged with sadness but ultimately there are people out there willing to go that extra mile to help individuals live their very best life right up until the end.

Thank you for the opportunity to read 'Dear Life'. This was a beautiful book about Rachel Clarke's life as a hospice doctor. Rachel shines through the book as a warm, sensitive and compassionate person whose aim is to provide her patients with comfort, choice and meaning as they are dying. She clearly has a vocation and has my admiration.

I enjoyed reading about Rachel's journey to becoming a doctor and the influences of her father throughout her life.

I highly recommend this and hope that this is not the last book form Rachel.

“For the dying are living, like everyone else.”

This memoir stirred many past emotions & memories for me as my mum developed cancer and spent her last few months in a local hospice. Thank you Rachel for giving me a better understanding of what my mum went through and how hospices work 'behind-the-scenes'. Each of your patients is lucky to have you caring and fighting for them.

'Dear Life' offers both sides of the story - a doctor working in palliative care and a daughter dealing with her own father's terminal cancer diagnosis. This book is particularly thought-provoking as death and the discussion of it is such a taboo subject in society yet so important for end of life care.

A fantastic read. If you enjoy these warts and all medical memoirs that have become increasingly popular then you will enjoy this. Less comedic and more a study on end of life care, how doctors struggle also, this is a heart wrenching look at making things as easy as possible during those last days.

Dear Life

“Death is not the opposite of life, but part of it” Murakami
The hardest thing to get your head around is the truth of the quotation above, but if someone gets close, it's Rachel Clarke.
When she was younger Rachel found it difficult to choose between a love of books and following in her GP Dad's footsteps. Initially she chose "books" and became a journalist before various brushes with death led her to think again about taking up medicine.

On her first day of training Rachel is surprised to be shown a film "Wit" which "forced us to see ourselves through our future patient's eyes and to confront our capacity to wound but... the only occasion during which as a student I was ever invited to consider human mortality "
Through her training Rachel admits she is a perfectionist who strives to be perfect in learning all the "facts." but starts to notice when patients are ignored, not listened to or not treated with humanity. She reflects that too much empathy and compassion would make their profession impossible. However, she finds herself noticing how the medical profession is often uneasy or unwilling to have conversations about death.

Embarking on the adrenalin rush of Emergency Medicine and "saving" lives she partially subscribes to the "fix" at all costs model of success but when doctors who consign patients to the "palliative dumpbin" things change…

She in increasingly drawn to this area and the death of her future Mother-in Law clarifies this thinking and she moves to palliative medicine.

What she finds there surprises her to some extent and for anyone who has never been in a hospice, what she encounters there may be a revelation.
"what dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living"

The narrative later on takes another turn when Rachel’s beloved father is diagnosed with cancer and she goes with him through the treatments, through his subsequent decisions, diagnoses and death. She is unflinchingly honest in her accounts of the rawness of her grief. When she visits him to say goodbye in the Funeral home she almost wants to crawl in the coffin with him such is the pain of her anguish. This is one of the darkest moments in the book.

Clarke is honest in pointing out that even in a hospice not everyone’s death is peaceful and that dying can involve suffering. However, she also reflects on that life is lived more intensely by people who know they are dying

“for there is a difference between people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it is simply this that the terminally ill know their time is running out while we live as though we have all the time in the world”

She describes how people in the hospice are able to live more in the moment and enjoy nature and small simple pleasures living “as richly as possible” In a hospice
“there is more of what matters in life- more love, strength, kindness, joy, tenderness, grace and compassion …than you can ever imagine”

Rachel’s is a medical memoir in which people are more than case studies- we hear their personal, human stories. Her own experience of her Dad’s dying and death highlights
“grief is the form love takes when someone dies and this pain, of all pains cannot be palliated. “

Rachel demystifies the dying process, palliative care and what may be going on at that hospice near you that you are maybe assuming is just there to die in.
She does make an earnest plea for us to talk more about death, make preparations and address “practical matters in a postscript which I would urge everyone to read. Those conversations aren’t easy but there can be comfort for the bereaved if they feel they have carried out someone’s wishes. As a bereavement counsellor I have heard about many funerals and it’s usually easier if the deceased has left some instructions and hopefully a will.

Who wouldn’t want Rachel to be THEIR palliative care doctor?


Although this book is about death and dying it’s also uplifting and makes you look at the world anew and appreciate that life is dear/precious.

Very interesting book. Well-written, easy to read, informative and involving.

I really enjoyed this memoir by Rachel Clarke. She was first a TV journalist. Her dad was a family doctor, and had also been a navy medic; an anaesthetist-so she tells of some of his medical stories too. She would follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in medicine, eventually specialising in palliative medicine. Also contains childhood reminiscences. Happy memories.

This memoir shows how fragile life is. It’s not just old people, there are even some scrapes when the author was younger. And if it's not your time to go, somehow you survive and on life goes. Everyone has them, near misses. We go about our lives; working, sleeping, our days punctuated by meals. We do the same day after day-like it will go on for ever. Some people are diagnosed with a terminal disease-they are dying. But we are all dying, they just know it will be soon-ish. The rest of us carry on and forget it could be us too. We just don't know when.

She loves her job. It's not all doom and gloom. She sees people appreciating life when it is shortened for them. The book is certainly not all depressing, but there are naturally some very emotional moments as Rachel deals with not just patients, but her own father's terminal diagnosis.

I’m so glad I read this book. It was my next read, but then it came at a time when my own father had a terrible emergency. Just as that was happening, I 'didn't want to go there with this book'. Dad was lucky to have a reprieve-so I did read this. And I'm so glad, it wasn't as I expected. It was a wonderful memoir.

A really excellent book and I can't wait to read her other memoir-I bought it a while ago, but ended up reading this one first-it didn't matter that I hadn't read the other first.

This is such a beautifully written book. Clarke describes how she swayed from a career in journalism to medicine with the stories of her father - him being a doctor - and patients that she writes about with so much compassion.

This book highlights death in such a magnificent way, not thinking about it as such a horrifying thing. This work took the ideas and memories of death in a whole new direction which I appreciated reading and I know others will as well.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for providing me with this opportunity of reading this arc in exchange for my honest review.

Wow this book is incredibly moving and powerful. Possibly more so as I nursed my husband for two years while his MS deteriorated to the point it affected his lung function and he died of pneumonia. I loved the author’s take on the different perspectives of palliative care, and how the compassion but clinical distance of a doctor is impossible to retain once someone you love is dying. In fact, I have found, that people employed in palliative care make the worst relatives and patients, possibly because the illusion of control is swept away. Nothing, not even her doctor’s knowledge, can mitigate the pain of loss.

It seems very brave to even write a book about death because the majority of people seem to be actively trying to avoid it. Death is the last taboo subject. Rachel tackles this with grace, compassion and dignity. The book is in three parts, with the first covering her personal life and the reasons that she moved her career from journalism to medicine. The move seems inevitable as she was following in the footsteps of her father. As she comes to specialising in an area of medicine she surprises herself by becoming drawn to palliative care. The second section covers her thoughts on this branch of medicine - an area that, in my opinion, provides the best medical care, because it focuses on the lived experience of the patient. Clarke describes the usual outlook of the NHS as ‘life at all costs’. I think there is a sort of arrogance in this type of medicine, where some doctors seem to think they have the skills to outrun death. Clarke talks eloquently and empathetically about the fears patients have and how her job is to address and allay those fears as much as possible, to alleviate the pain and suffering. She also includes a very honest portrayal of some of those patients and the range of emotion they go through as they near the end - from denial and anger, through to a certain acceptance for some, All of her training and experience becomes even more important when her father is diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer and the book moves back to the personal.

Clarke understands the luminal space that the long term sick and terminally ill both occupy. That space of the in between. If we are always sick we have to find a way of living regardless, because all of our time can’t be taken up with illness and dying. We still have friends and family, obligations and bills to pay. We need to pass the time. To remember who we are, because we are not this illness. This death. As Clarke so succinctly puts it: ‘For the dying are living, like everyone else’.

Dear Life: a doctor's story of love and loss
By Rachel Clarke
Published in UK Jan 30th 2020 by Little, Brown

Rachel Clarke had led a fascinating professional life as a journalist before finally becoming a doctor. From her first introduction to death via tv shows, her father's medical anecdotes and then her own very real brushes with death by an almost fatal car accident and being present during a bombing in London, death has very much been a part of her life.

However, for me, her work as a specialist palliative care doctor is even more gripping and fascinating to read than her life as a journalist. She brings such incredible compassion to her work, to the people she considers it a privilege to treat and help, and she argues cogently and convincingly that palliative care deserves more airtime, more funding, more public awareness and constant improvements. After all, it is a certainty that we are all going to die. How we make the most of our last days, weeks and months when given a terminal diagnosis can most definitely be improved upon by making hospice care less of a postcode/funding lottery and more of a guaranteed standard of care within the NHS.

She writes movingly of making incredibly fast wedding arrangements for people in hospices, of birthday parties, enabling very unwell people to take part in special occasions which have immense meaning for them and the over-arching importance of providing honest communication on whatever level or depth in which the terminally ill person wishes to engage with the palliative care staff.

Interspersed with her own life and work are wonderful vignettes of her GP father and her interactions with him. They are very different characters in many ways, with different views of life and politics, but their absolute respect and love for each other shines through the entire book.

How she deals with her beloved father's terminal illness and death is influenced by her own work and her work is in turn influenced by his death. He sounds a remarkable man, someone I would have loved to have met in real life, and thanks to Rachel's book, I feel as though I have.

This is a truly wonderful book, and definitely one which I will be re-reading several times.

Many thanks to the publisher for allowing me an Advance Reading Copy via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion.

I felt the warmth of care, anxiety in trying to get things right, smiled at the happy moments, and cried... thank you for your insight into care, dignity in death and dying.

Written by a journalist come NHS doctor in palliative care, Rachel Clarke’s Dear Life gives an insight into her journey from initial journalistic career to her own personal need for change, becoming an NHS palliative care doctor.

Through various quotes which start each chapter and sum up its tone, we are given short insights into the lives of patients (some changes to protected the privacy of her patients and colleagues) she has met, learnt through and treated, to her own personal life experiences, the relationship she had with her father, and care during his final days.

Clarke captures her thoughts, emotions, actions and want of trying to give people a pain free death, and means to enjoy their finals weeks, days or hours.

So well written.

We will all die one day, and if we’re lucky enough to be in the hands of NHS staff like Rachael, rest assured we can die pain free, achieve the final things we are able to do, and with dignity.

This book is Rachel Clarke's own autobiographical account of being a Doctor in palliative end of life care. It is honest and real and doesn't try to sugar coat the reality of a patient approaching their life's end. There are accounts of general palliative care to patients and then Dr Clarke's own father is diagnosed with cancer. I'll be honest, I found it quite hard to read in places but I think the 'ease' with which you could read parts depends on your own personal circumstances and family medical history as well. While I would recommend this book the only thing I found lacking was that the focus is on the end of life in this world and the view that death is a part of life. I agree death is a part of life but in my view, as a Christian death is an enemy and for those who believe in an afterlife this has huge implications for how we view death. I appreciate that Dear Life isn't written, as far as I'm aware, from any religious perspective yet, as a Christian myself, I am aware of how belief in heaven can massively effect how a patient views the approach of death. I may be mistaken but I found the book lacking in this one area, from a patient's perspective. Nonetheless I would recommend the book. Not always comfortable or easy reading but worthwhile with helpful suggestions for the future of such care. It's almost like a fly on the wall look at palliative care. The book also has a lovely cover, if that kind of thing matters to you! Recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown for ARC.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. I enjoyed this story very much and felt like I knew each character personally due to the description of them. I enjoyed the storyline. This is not my usual genre but in this instance I am extremely pleased and grateful for opening up my mind to something totally different. Thanks again.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Little Brown UK for my copy of this book. Wow I am speechless with wonder, emotion and inspiration. This book is truly wonderful. It is incredibly well written, beautifully and sensitively portraying the environment of the hospice and terminally ill patients. Last year I lost a dear friend to cancer and had the incredible privilege of spending precious time with her in her last few months, including in a hospice. I can vouch for the absolute truth of Rachel's words in every aspect of palliative care. Everyone should read this powerful, amazing book.

I make no apologies for getting onto my soap-box and tub-thumbing and I hope that when you have read my reasons you will concur it was a good thing to do.

I loved this book because, although its theme is palliative care, it is so full of life, love and positives. Rachel Clarke has written a book that came close, on several occasions, to moving me to tears and I cannot remember a book EVER doing that. As a largely unemotional sort the messages in the book surprised the heck out of me - how on earth could a book about dying "get to me" in such a profound way? It did and in surprising ways. After all, when writing about ministering to people who can actually see the light at the end of their life's tunnel, to be able to turn the whole thing into a life affirming experience is truly amazing. I am sure there are many caring doctors like Rachel but it is her book that I am quoting from with, for example, its questions that, as she suggests, no one asks or answers.

Quoting verbatim - "The hospice space , like its practice, toppled conventional medical paradigms, and from day one my pulse quickened with possibility. Why can’t a wife curl up in a hospital bed beside her dying husband ? Why can’t we ensure there is a way for an inpatient who knows their precious time is short to have sex with their partner, should they choose to? Why aren’t we throwing open our doors to teenage children bearing boxes of pizza for movie nights with Dad, before they lose him for ever? Why are pet dogs and cats seen as nothing but health hazards when, for comfort, they may surpass anything a human has to offer? And why – the most heretical question of all – why are all these questions, and a thousand more like them, not being asked in non-palliative, everyday hospital environments?"

I would like to offer a personal anecdote here. A long-time friend and his wife have just moved into a warden-assisted flat and one of the first comments offered to them by a resident was "welcome to god's waiting room" and that silly statement made me very angry as it shows how blind so many people are to reality. The day that we are born is the day that we enter "god's waiting room" and the manner in which we sooner or later leave it is the story of our life. Life is never a room for waiting in. We can choose to revel in the time that we have or not!!

If you have read this review and it in any way resonates with you, you must buy and read the whole book for yourself and then, I hope, you will be tempted to get on your own soap-box and start tub-thumping about it. The world really does need to know that death, whilst it is inevitable for all of us, does not and should not be the morbid, unspoken "terror" that it is for so many people.

Compassionate, insightful and beautifully written, this is my non-fiction stand-out read of the year - even though, having lost my mother last year, the final part had me sobbing in recognition. I read Rachel's previous book about medicine, Your Life in my Hands, and loved that too. Dear Life is profound and human, and I can't think of another book where I've highlighted so many parts to read again. Though it talks about dying, it tells us much more about living. With a beautiful cover too, it deserves to be huge.