Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (Taschenbuch)

Over the past few years, when faced with the information that someone I'd known was dying, I did - nothing. Retreating, I was terrified of my own mortality and of what I might do if I were around someone who was dying. Would I say the wrong thing or nothing at all? Would I cry, or do something to inadvertently hurt them? What is dying like? This book is great as a comforting instruction manual on what happens, what to do, and what not to do.

It begins with information about what happens to the body when it is in the process of dying, then moves into experiences the authors have had in dealing with people who are dying, or whose loved ones are dying. They have helpful information throughout the book for those, like me, who were unsure about what to say or do.

They include individual stories about messages people send when they are approaching death and how not to miss them; seeing people who have already died and what that may mean; symbolic dreams and how to let the dreamer find the meaning; choosing a time to die (not by suicide); waiting for a person to arrive or an event to happen.

Family and friends often ignore this precious information. It seems illogical, far out, too much like stories about abduction by aliens. We brush them off as hallucinations, caused by denial or possibly drug-induced.

When I first heard volunteers, nurses and others who work in hospice tell stories of people who have similar Nearing Death Experiences (not to be confused with "Near Death Experiences"), I was dubious. However, in my readings and hospice volunteer work, I find that these stories are universal, timeless and not as new age-y as I'd thought. We've been ignoring these wonderfully soothing stories of how people die, because for years we've moved birthing and dying out of the family and into hospitals. We are beginning to move them back.

If you've lost a loved one, are dealing with someone who is dying (yourself or someone else), if you avoid visiting friends who are dying or if you're struggling with your own awareness that someday you will die, please read this book. It will put your mind at ease.

We hate death for two reasons. It ends life prematurely; and we do not know what lies beyond it. We suffer from an illusion, akin to that of the desirability of an afterlife, that we should be happier if we lived for ever. Animal desires are always for an extension of what satisfies them. Only two hundred years ago a man who reached the age of forty was exceeding the average life-span; and perhaps two hundred years from now centenarians will be as common as septuagenarians today -- genetic engineering is taking care of that. But man still craves a longer life. The function of death is to put tension into life; and the more we increase the length and the security of individual existence then the more tension we remove from it. All our pleasurable experiences contain a faint yet terrible element of the condemned man's last breakfast, an echo of the intensity of feeling of the poet who knows he is going to die, of the young soldier going doomed into battle. Books like this one by Callanan and Kelley, assist us in better coping with the idea of death, as we approach old age and/or terminal illness. Death is not a sinister door we walk towards; it is our walking towards.