Sunita Puri, "That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour" (Penguin, 2020)

Summary

Sunita Puri is a writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor at the UMass Chan Medical School. In her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (Penguin, 2020), she explores her journey of helping patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In her article in Tricycle’s Winter 2023 issue, “A Gift,” she explores how she has learned to navigate love and loss through the lens of impermanence.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and co-host Sharon Salzberg sit down with Puri to discuss the importance of unlearning our assumptions around death, how language can shape people’s experience of illness, her journey of learning to regard death with reverence instead of fear, and how working with dying patients influences how she lives her daily life.

Life As It Is is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

Your Host

Tricycle Magazine

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. This approach has enabled Tricycle to successfully attract readers from all walks of life, many of whom desire to enrich their lives through a deeper knowledge of Buddhist traditions.

View Profile