Book review: Longtime radio host Diane Rehm has written a well-researched book looking at both sides of the right to die debate.

WHEN MY TIME COMES

Author: Diane Rehm

Knopf, 228 pages, $25.95

Diane Rehm is well-known for her award-winning NPR radio show, which aired for 37 years and from which she is now retired. She still hosts the podcast “On My Mind” and has written three books. In her latest book she interviews a fascinating selection of people, known and not-so-well-known, on the topic of assisted dying. She has presented those on either side of the fence on the decision of whether or not to let a person die with assistance. She avoids the word “suicide,” preferring the phrase “relinquishes his or her life” instead.

Among those interviewed are people who run the gamut of the terminally ill: end-of-life physicians, geriatricians, a widow and widower, directors of hospice facilities, a death educator, the national director of Physicians for Compassionate Care, Death with Dignity supporters, priests, friends of the author’s, the director of the Bay Area End of Life Options, a delegate from the Maryland House of Delegates, attorneys, the national medical director of Compassion and Choices, the chief of protocol in the Reagan administration, and students, including her grandson, a sophomore at Dartmouth.

Her first husband “relinquished his life” as he suffered increasingly from Parkinson’s. She later married John Hagedorn when she was 84. Her not wanting people to suffer began in 1955 when she was 6 years old as she watched her mother die a painful death from cirrhosis of the liver.

Choice is everything, and she says she hopes that the right to die becomes a national issue, not a state-by-state one as it is now. Every person should die with dignity. Many people interviewed in this book are favorable concerning right-to-die issues, but she also speaks with Roman Catholic priests who are against medical aid for the dying.

She writes about how to speak to one’s family about end-of-life care with a hospice spiritual care director. He says counseling may be appropriate when one is in “spiritual or existential despair.”

A lecture given to second-year medical students at George Washington University by David Grube, the national medical director of Compassion and Choices, is particularly notable. He says, “Continuous deep sedation is legal in all states” and is doctor-controlled; the doctor puts you to sleep and keeps you asleep until you pass away.

The book is at times raw and at other times compassionate. The topic of the right to die is fraught with difficult decisions and in this book, the arguments are addressed in Rehm’s usual fair and evenhanded way. Over and over you read the importance of the words “death with dignity.”

The foreword by John Grisham is moving, but her last chapter, in which she talks with her grandson, is memorable. She tells him what Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote that let her family know exactly what she wanted in order to die peacefully and quietly. You may want to adopt a quote from Lindbergh, and use it for your own family. Rehm suggests that even more valuable than a paper document might be a laptop. Consider a tape — audio and especially video — to record your wishes with a close family member. It will carry a lot more weight than a written statement.

Rehm’s book should be on everyone’s shelf and can answer a multitude of questions about end-of-life decisions.

Mims Cushing lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and has written three books.