Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live »

Marie de Hennezel is a gifted psychologist who works as part of a remarkable team of doctors and nurses in a hospital for the terminally ill in Paris. The men and women who come there, some alone with no one to help, some with their families, do not always know that they are dying. It is Marie de Hennezel's aim first to bring them - and their loved ones - to this knowledge and then to encourage them to live each day remaining to them as fully as possible, to move beyond pain, confusion, or despair toward a perception of their lives as a whole, and to make peace with the approaching end. We watch as she sits with each patient, sometimes encouraging them to release their fears and angers, sometimes providing just a calm, comforting presence, or honest answers to difficult questions. Through her amazing gentleness and the unforgettable people she helps, we learn how precious the final days of a person's life can be and how deeply moving in can be to share these moments with someone. Even more, we come to realize just how much about living there is to learn from those who are dying. In an age when we are taught not to talk about death, this important and profound book lends us the strength to talk about it, gives us hope, and celebrates the amazing courage of the human spirit.

Publishers Weekly

In this intensely personal, luminous report, a bestseller in France, Hennezel, a Parisian psychologist, discusses her work with patients in a palliative care unit at a hospital for the terminally ill, as well as her care of AIDS and HIV-positive patients at another hospital. She assists Danielle, stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease, a paralysis-inducing neuromuscular disorder, who believes her illness is rooted in her childhood fear of abandonment, and who reconnects with her twin sister. Blending compassion with clinical insight, Hennezel conducts Jungian dream analysis with Louis, a close friend dying of AIDS, and with Dmitri, an elderly Russian migr cancer victim who strongly believes in reincarnation. Sometimes her efforts to help patients overcome fear, to reconnect with their true feelings, to reconcile with loved ones, are inconclusive. Yet more often than not, her patients die with serenity and strength. Her conviction that acceptance of death makes us ever more aware of ourselves, of other people and of the world animates her beautifully controlled, inspirational narrative. 40,000 first printing. (Feb.)