The subtitle "how the dying teach us how to live", had a unusually specific meaning for me. As I watched my emotional response and empathy to the conversations between Hennezel and terminally ill patients, I began to notice how many patients wanted to die earlier, not later, until, that is, their conversation with Hennezel. And, in each case, the patient was glad to live another few weeks or months because, during the conversations, they began to resolve some outstanding issues about their lives. Just as Hennezel helped them awaken to the value of attending to unfinished business, I too came to realize how much unfinished business I have myself. Or, put another way, I see the backlog of things-I've-hoped-to-do (since retirement) through the lens of "unfinished business." And I've since realized that other authors such as Stephen Levine
A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
have emphasized the same point.
The conversations between Hennezel and her terminally ill patients are invariably moving because of the compassion that Hennezel and the nurses on the staff extend to their patients. On pages 47-50 Hennezel refers to the field of Haptonomie (found in the French (but not the English) Wikipedia) associated with Frans Veldman which is about the importance of affection and human touch for "affectivity." This is as widely appreciated around child birth as it is under appreciated at the time of death (in the US at least). Hennezel and her co-workers implement this affectivity in their palliative unit for the dying and I think the articulation of that practice is much of what makes this book so emotionally moving, at least for me.
I can open the volume to any pages and within minutes I'm teary eyed. It's the depth of my emotional responses to the moving conversations that keeps me on my new track of attending to unfinished business. I dare not read the whole book in one setting -- perhaps 10 pages/week will keep me moving on what is genuinely a new path for me. I keep wanting to buy a crate of these books and hand them out on the street corner but, since the 1973 publication of Earnest Becker's
The Denial of Death
, I realize that issues surrounding death are not for everyone.
I wrote everything above almost a year ago but since returning to the book time and again, I now realize something I had not fully appreciated, viz., just how many people in palliative units are begging for something very specific, an injection to enable them to die. If most adults fully realized how they will likely feel about dying once they approach those final days (in a first rate palliative unit as well as nursing homes with fewer resources), I suspect the laws against euthanasia would be off the books. I think that Becker's phrase, "denial of death," helps explain why euthanasia remains illegal in countries like the US. The inevitability of death gives meaning to life and Hennezel's excellent book facilitates greater presence to the death of others, to one's own mortality and, hence, the value of living.
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Moving and honest accounts of the reality of dying and what it can teach us
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2013