The experience of life-threatening illness is one of the most difficult situations that individuals and their families ever have to face. This book is meant to be a guide for anyone counseling or offering professional care to persons with life-threatening illness. Living with life-threatening illness is the theme of this book as it describes the particular challenges that individuals, families, and caregivers face at varying points, namely prediagnostic phase, diagnostic phase, chronic phase, recovery phase and terminal phase, during serious illness. After a brief introduction on the terminology, Chapter 2 of the book reviews those caregivers who have impacted history, placing this work in its context as well as highlighting newer developments such as concurrent care. This is followed by two chapters addressing the particular ethical and systematic stresses that those persons who counsel or care for individuals with life-threatening illness may experience, causing moral distress. People respond to life-threatening illness in a variety of ways, and accordingly, Chapter 5 considers the range of responses to life-threatening illness, which individuals, their families, and their caregivers may experience. Developmental, psychological and social factors and generational differences affect the ways that an individual responds to life-threatening illness. Five other chapters describe particular issues that arise at different points during the experience of life-threatening illness. Chapter 12 considers the ways in which families might be affected by the illness and offers suggestions for counseling families that are coping with the illness of a family member.