Being Mortal: When Fighting Isn't the Brave Choice Anymore

Hi, it’s Diana from We Get Better with Age, and I’m continuing my series on books I’ve read and genuinely enjoyed. I’ll be honest with you from the start: this one is not an easy read. But it’s a book I recommend with my whole heart — because it put words to something most of us spend our lives carefully not looking at, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

The book is Being Mortal, by the surgeon Atul Gawande, and it opens with a woman named Sara Monopoli. She was thirty-four, pregnant with her first child, when she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer — and she had never smoked. Over the months that followed, she went through four rounds of chemotherapy. None of it shrank her tumors. What it did instead was weaken her, suppress her immune system, and eventually leave her vulnerable to the pneumonia that took her life in a hospital, still chasing a treatment that almost no one around her believed would work.

Gawande doesn’t tell her story to assign blame. He tells it becaus…