The authors are two sisters who were born and raised in Burlingame, California, a suburb thirteen miles south of San Francisco. Their formative years were very Ozzie and Harriet: backyard barbeques, shopping trips to the Emporium, sleepovers and girl scouts. The older sister, Jeanne, encountered the Sixties when she went away to college, first to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington, then to U.C. Berkeley.
Three years younger, Eileen skipped college entirely and joined a commune, which she eventually had to leave when she finally wanted to attend college. Despite the freedom espoused by the commune, the women were expected to rear babies, garden, and bake bread. Variations from the norm were lightly tolerated.
It was a difficult time for smart women to excel. Jeanne was admittedly one of the brightest students to attend her high school, yet she received no college counseling. Her counselor, in fact, told her that boys would want little to do with her as long as she acted so smart in the classroom. If she just didn't always know the right answer . . . .
Defying the social stereotypes of the times, both sisters ended up in challenging professions. Jeanne attended medical school at the University of Washington in Seattle, and has practiced emergency medicine in small rural hospitals in Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Oregon. Eileen received her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She left a corporate practice in Boston to pursue a writing career and currently lives in Southern California.
Beginning in the late-Nineties, the sisters found they shared an interest in the legal and medical issues surrounding death and dying. This was the point at which palliative care and the concept of "comfort care only" first began to surface at conferences and in the occasional academic article.
As a practical matter, they have each struggled with patients' and clients' shattered expectations as their end-of-life wishes collide with a medical system overwhelmingly geared to sustaining life at any cost. Together the sisters decided to write this book to present new options for choice and control at the end of life.
