Final Choices is a personal story that discusses an often-avoided topic in families in our society: our own death and dying or that of our loved ones. Whether we want to or not, we all need to prepare for the final moments in our lives. The process of dying and the grief that comes after is something that we need not be blindsided by, but can prepare for. Making the final choices in life certainly are not easy, but we all should prioritize these decisions for ourselves to ensure our wishes are known and carried out.

Using a first-person narrative based on her journals, Sakre tells a compelling, vivid, and explicit story of the contrasting final stages of two of the most important people in her life: her mother and her father.

When her mother was diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s, the doctors took over and led her mother through several treatments that were unnecessary and didn’t give her the cure they promised. She was terminal from the onset, but they wouldn’t admit it. She and her husband blindly followed whatever the doctors prescribed, never questioning them, nor did the doctors ever ask them what they wanted. Her mother’s two-year demise was in a morphine haze, totally doctor-directed. Twenty-some years later, her dad was given a terminal diagnosis from a collapsed aorta valve. But by then the state of Oregon had the Death with Dignity Act in place, and her dad at age 92 chose to choreograph his own final act by using the law to end his misery. This patient-directed ending was the opposite of what her mother experienced. The two paths are compared side by side in the book so the listeners can make up their own minds.