Dear Life

In Dear Life, using vivid and moving case studies, Karen Hitchcock shows what care for the elderly and dying is really like—both the good and the bad. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions and over-treatment, frailty and dementia.

'The elderly, the frail are our society. They are our parents and grandparents, our carers and neighbours, and they are every one of us in the not-too-distant future. They are not a growing cost to be managed or a burden to be shifted or a horror to be hidden away, but people whose needs require us to change.'

Throughout Dear Life, Hitchcock argues against the creeping tendency to see the elderly as a 'burden'—difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous. We must plan for a future when more of us will be old, she argues, with the aim of making that time better, not shorter. And we must change our institutions and society to meet the needs of an ageing population. Dear Life is a landmark book by one of Australia's most powerful writers.