Few people choose to contemplate critical illness or the inevitability of death until their time comes. Because possibilities are rarely discussed, many people are unprepared or unable to make critical end-of-life decisions and spend their last days in over-medicalized and unnecessarily painful and protracted situations. Breaking frankly through the taboo of discussing death, Hattie Bryant shows that we have a choice. Inspired by the peaceful death her mother was almost denied, Bryant began gathering information from national experts in palliative care, geriatrics, oncology, bio-ethics, psychology, and spirituality. I’ll Have It My Way credibly and passionately presents the case for personal responsibility in the healthcare, legal, and procedural decisions that all of us must make—if they are not to be made for us. By making our wishes known and communicating them effectively, we remove the burden from our loved ones of making the deeply personal choices that will enable us to live our lives more fully to the end. I’ll Have It My Way provides useful information from experts throughout healthcare, real-life examples that illustrate the consequences of decisions made or not made, and a thought-provoking guide that takes the reader on a journey of discovery to learn what a life well lived means to them. Spoiler alert: we will all die. But if we follow Hattie Bryant’s sound advice, our story can have the ending that we believe is best.
