Final Gifts: Understanding the special awareness, needs, and communications of the dying, by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley.
In the past 2-1/2 years I have read many books about caregiving and aging as I travel this path with my mother. This is the only one I’ve read describing what the last weeks and days of a person’s life might be like. I feel somehow better prepared for when my mother’s last days come. Prepared to listen for clues: is she afraid of something? have unfinished business? looking for information? And to answer questions I might not otherwise have realized she was asking; and to ask questions so that I might understand her needs and provide reassurance.
Hospice nurses, Callahan and Kelley, share intimate experiences with patients at the end of life and their families. “Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts—of wisdom, faith, and love—that the dying leave for the living to share.”
Daughter Off Duty 
Unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way. Both of my parents were fine one day and gone the next. No decline, just a sudden end. I don’t know if that is easier or harder to deal with.
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Easier for them, I expect.
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Easier (even if you can’t see how) on you as well as them. Grieving is grieving. If we make sure every day that we are in contact somehow with our loved ones and we give the flowers (so to speak) while they are alive, then I think that makes the horrific ride through grief a tad better.
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