That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

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. It was that tension that eventually drew Puri to palliative medicine. Interweaving stories of Puri’s family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night (Viking) is a meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well.