Excerpt from Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I was away in Glasgow at a medical meeting two days later when the diagnosis of untreatable cancer was finally made and my mother was sent home to die. There was no question of chemotherapy in somebody her age with such advanced disease and she didn't want it either, which my father found hard to accept. I returned from Glasgow and went to my parents' house to find them sitting in the kitchen. My mother had become more jaundiced from liver failure since I had last seen her and looked worn and frail though fully herself.

'I don't want to leave you all,' she said sadly. 'But I don't think death is the end, you know.' My eighty­six­year­old father – already starting to suffer from the dementia from which he died eight years later – looked on, with a vague, lost expression as though he couldn't really take in what was happening: that his fifty­year­old son was crying over his wife of over sixty years, and that she was shortly to die.

Her condition deteriorated very quickly over the next few days, and she was dead within a fortnight; a short illness as the obituaries call it, though it felt quite long while it lasted. Until the very end she remained entirely lucid and completely herself, with her slightly ironical, modest sense of humour preserved until the last.

Each day she weakened, and soon she was established in a bed during the day in the music room downstairs. I would carry her up the staircase of my parents' house in my arms at the end of the day – by now she weighed next to nothing. But even this was quickly too much for her, and so after discussion with me and one of my sisters, who is a nurse, my mother remained in the bedroom she had shared with our father for the last forty years. This, she decided, would be where she would die. It was a beautiful room – a perfectly proportioned Georgian room with wood­panelling, painted a quiet, faded green, and an open fireplace and mantelpiece decorated with her collection of little pottery birds and eggs. The tall windows, with their rectangular panes of glass, looked out over the trees of Clapham Common, especially beautiful at that time of year. To the left one could see the church on the Common which she attended every Sunday and where her funeral service would be held.

Every morning and evening my sister and I would come in to care for her. At first I would help her to the bathroom where my sister would wash her but soon she was unable to walk even this short distance and instead I would lift her onto the commode we had borrowed from the local hospice. My sister was wonderful to watch, kindly and gently discussing and explaining everything as she carried out the simple, necessary nursing. We have both seen many people die, after all, and I had worked as a geriatric nurse many years ago too. It felt quite easy and natural for us both, I think, de­ spite our intense emotions. It's not that we felt anxious – the three of us knew she was dying – I suppose what we felt was simply intense love, a love quite without ulterior motive, quite without the vanity and self­interest of which love is so often the expression.

'It's a quite extraordinary feeling to be surrounded by so much love,' she said two days before she died. 'I count my blessings.'

She was right to do this, of course. I doubt if any of us will enjoy – if that's the word to use – such a perfect death when our own time comes. To die in her own home, after a long life, quite quickly, looked after by her own children, surrounded by her family, entirely free of pain. A few days before she died, almost by chance, the family – children, grandchildren and even great­grandchildren, and two of her oldest friends – found themselves all gathered in the family home. We staged what amounted to an impromptu wake, before her death, much to my mother's delight. While she lay dying upstairs we sat down round the dining room table and remembered her life, and drank to her memory even though she was not yet dead, and ate supper cooked by my wife­ to­be Kate. I had only met Kate – to my mother's joy, after the trauma of the end of my first marriage – a few months earlier. Kate had been slightly surprised to find herself cooking supper for seventeen people when earlier in the day I had hesitantly asked her if she might cook supper for five.

Excerpted from Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. Copyright © 2015 by Henry Marsh. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.