For a Catholic, there is something missing in this otherwise moving doctor’s memoir. Rachel Clarke is a specialist in palliative medicine and is familiar with death.

Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss
RACHEL CLARKE
(LITTLE, BROWN, 336 pp, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

For a Catholic, there is something missing in this otherwise moving doctor’s memoir. Rachel Clarke is a specialist in palliative medicine and is familiar with death. We learn of her own brushes with mortality, and those of her patients; and of the loss of her father, also a doctor. She explains why she is drawn to caring for the dying, and that for her a hospice thrums with life.

But there is no mention of Christ’s death, and little discussion of faith more widely. While Clarke has written an excellent secular account of dying, even if you do not have faith yourself, you can believe in the power of belief for others, never more so than at the moment of their passing.

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