Cover of Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live

Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live

How do we learn to die? Most of us spend our lives avoiding that question, but this luminous book—a major best-seller in France—answers it with a directness and eloquence that are nothing less than transforming. As a psychologist in a hospital for the terminally ill in Paris, Marie de Hennezel has spent seven years tending to people who are relinquishing their hold on life.

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She tells the stories of her patients and their families. de Hennezel teaches us how to turn death—our loved ones' or our own—from something lonely and agonizing into a sacred passage. She discusses the importance of an honest reckoning, the value of ritual, the necessity of touch. In imparting these lessons, Intimate Deathbecomes a guide to living more fully, more intensely, than we had thought possible.

"Unique...Of all the books I have read about the endings of our lives, this elegiac testimony has taught me the most."—Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., author of How We Die

"The quiet, obvious truths [de Hennezel] discovers in her work—these things have a kind of cumulative power."—Washington Post Book World

Subject
psychology
Themes
death
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 208 pages

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