Intimate Death : How the Dying Teach Us to Live - Softcover

Hennezel Marie De

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0751523321 ISBN 13: 9780751523324

Publisher: Warner, 1998

Synopsis

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 do not always know that they are dying. It is Marie de Hennezel's aim to bring them - and their loved ones - to this knowledge and then to encourage them to live each day that remains as fully and serenely as possible. 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 it is to share these moments with someone else. In an age where people hesitate to talk about dying, this important and ground-breaking book lends us the strength to confront the mysteries of death, gives us hope and celebrates the courage of the human spirit. It is also remarkably life-affirming.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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. 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 Death becomes 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
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Born in France in 1958, Marie de Hennezel began her career as a psychologist. In 1987 she joined the first palliative care unit in a Parisian hospital for people with terminal illness. She gives lectures on approaching the end of life and seminars on accompanying the dying.

Edition details

• Publisher: Warner
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0751523321
• ISBN 13: 9780751523324
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208