The Final Crossing: Learning to Die in Order to Live

This book from Lost Borders Press is the story of two worlds meeting, told on both a personal and an historical scale. The personal account recalls "the final crossing" of Steven Foster - one of the pioneers of modern-day wilderness rites of passage - from the perspective of the hospice physician who helped ferry him across. Interspersed with Steven and Scott's story is a more sweeping historical view of how the rites of passage movement and the hospice movement have converged. "This is an extraordinarily wise and compassionate book written by a physician of the body and the heart. In this beautifully written account of the death of his beloved teacher and friend we can discover the great mystery of meeting death as a teacher and friend. This book is for all of us. Its depths plumb ours, its wisdom opens ours, and the compassion of its author reminds us that this quality resides in all of us." - Joan Halifax Roshi, Abbot of Upaya Zen Center, founder of the Project on Being with Dying, and author of The Fruitful Darkness.

Dr. Scott Eberle is a physician specializing in end-of-life care, Scott serves as medical director for Hospice of Petaluma in his hometown of Petaluma, California. Having first learned the science of medicine at U.C. San Francisco medical school, he then learned the art of medicine from countless people living and dying with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. He survived this difficult time by regularly seeking sanctuary, either in monasteries or in the natural world, completing over 150 retreats during a 15-year period. He recently ended a 16-year career as an an AIDS specialist so he could focus his energies on hospice work and "The Practice of Living and Dying" work he does with Meredith. As he has written in his new book, The Final Crossing: "So now I am a physician who specializes in supporting life transitions. I am a hospice doctor who sits with the dying in their homes, and I am a rite-of-passage guide who sits with 'the dying' out in the desert."