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In this dynamic, engaging conversation, Dr. Puri will be in conversation with TMC Faculty about the ways that spiritual dimensions of life and death shape how people think about what matters most—and what doesn't—as they face their mortality. Concepts of dignity, suffering, and mercy are largely absent from conversations with people who are seriously ill, yet they are the heartbeat of decisions about living and dying well. Drawing on her experiences as a palliative care physician and her writing about life and medicine in the eleventh hour, Dr. Puri will invite the audience to consider how these ideas influence their lives and how they might shape their wishes for life's end.
Sunita Puri, MD
Author, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (Viking, 2019), Director, Inpatient Palliative Medicine Service, Associate Professor of Medicine, UC Irvine School of Medicine
Dr. Sunita Puri is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where she is the Director of the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. A 2025 Literature Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation, she is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. A graduate of Yale University and the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Slate, Wall Street Journal, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among other places. She and her work have been featured in the Atlantic, People Magazine, PBS’ Christian Amanpour Show, NPR, the Guardian, BBC, India Today, and Literary Hub. In 2019, the Guardian made a mini-documentary of her work with her patients, which has been viewed over 3.5 million times. She has been awarded writing residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, and UCross. A sought-after speaker who has delivered lectures around the world, Dr. Puri is passionate about the ways that the precise and compassionate use of language can empower patients and physicians to have the right conversations about living and dying.
That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour
Dr. Puri is author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (Viking, 2019). As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents’ experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine’s impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life’s temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine–a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.
Interweaving evocative stories of Puri’s family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.