MCW Common Read

Finding Language for the Unspeakable: A Conversation About Suffering, Illness, and Dying

Presenter:
Sunita Puri, MD, MS

In this talk, writer and palliative care physician Sunita Puri will discuss the importance of language in medicine, the way that writing and doctoring are intimately intertwined, and how finding ways to be radically honest with patients and families is the highest form of compassion. We are looking forward to a heartfelt and rich discussion on what it means to live and die well as a Common Read community this year! The MCW Common Read #MCWreads

About the book:
As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents’ experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine’s impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life’s temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine–a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care. Interweaving evocative stories of Puri’s family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

About the Author:
Sunita Puri is a writer of memoir and nonfiction, as well as a palliative medicine physician and the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center. She is gifted in the art of finding compassionate ways to discuss life and death.