Not The Last Goodbye: On Life, Death, Healing, and Cancer

David Servan-Schreiber was a neuroscientist on an urgent mission to bring hope and alternatives to those with cancer. Nineteen years after being diagnosed with the disease, an emergency MRI confirmed his greatest fear: his brain cancer had returned. Here, he shares his coming to terms with the news and, with courage and candour, examines his life from the perspective of one who understands that his illness is terminal—nevertheless living every day fully and with purpose. As the author of Anticancer and a doctor who has given hope to millions around the world, Servan-Schreiber frankly acknowledges the ways in which he departed from his own advice. Reaffirming the Anticancer program—nutrition, exercise, rest and meditation—he also weaves in the stories of a number of clinical cases and offers a rebalanced approach, emphasizing certain elements that he himself tended to ignore.

Not the Last Goodbye raises many of the most complex and personal questions about how we choose to live and how we prepare for death, striking a delicate balance between the limits of medicine and the hope that sustains us as we confront them.