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  • Dear Life

  • A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss
  • By: Rachel Clarke
  • Narrated by: Rachel Clarke
  • Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (18 ratings)

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Dear Life

By: Rachel Clarke
Narrated by: Rachel Clarke
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Publisher's Summary

It takes courage to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting, fading, no more than a spark against the darkness of deep time. Yet when everything you have been and done and meant to the world is being prised from your grasp, human connections are the vital medicine. It is other people who make the difference. 

Rachel Clarke grew up spellbound by her father's stories of practising medicine. Then, as a doctor herself, one who specialised in palliative medicine, she found herself contemplating all her training had taught her in the face of her own beloved father's mortality.  

Dear Life is the inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking and yet deeply uplifting story of the doctor we would all want to have by our side in a crisis. The hospice where Rachel works is, of course, a world haunted by loss and grief, but it is also teeming with life. 

If there is a difference between people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it is simply this: that the terminally ill know their time is running out, while we live as though we have all the time in the world. In a hospice, therefore, there is more of what matters in life - more love, more strength, more kindness, more smiles, more dignity, more joy, more tenderness, more grace, more compassion - than you could ever imagine. 

Dear Life is a love letter - to a father, to a profession, to life itself. 

©2020 Rachel Clarke (P)2020 Hachette Audio UK

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Dear Life...Everyone Needs To Listen & Learn About Love & Care.

I chose this book by Dr Rachel Clarke after reading extraordinary reviews on-line where it was published.
As someone at the older end of the listener group, 70, and having been diagnosed with cancer 3 years ago, I wanted to know more about grief, palliative care and the stories from a doctor who in the first part of her life, chose to go down the journalism road...only to return and become a doctor. Like her Dad. This is also one of the most touching life stories I have read/heard and Rachel’s narration throughout helps add the love, care and sadness to the dealing with patients and families in palliative care. None of this, however, prepares her for her father’s cancer diagnosis. Do listen to this book..and learn as I did.
Wholeheartedly learned from and loved this book.

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Timely, relevant and wonderful

Dear Life will make you laugh, cry and perhaps change the way you think about death.
You will need tissues.
This book is magnificent .... read it.

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