Life's Last Gift: Giving and Receiving Peace When a Loved One Is Dying

Charles Garfield, PhD, founded Shanti, an internationally honored volunteer organization dedicated to the care of the dying and those living with cancer and AIDS, and the Shanti National Training Institute, which takes Shanti’s model to organizations around the country and world. He has been teaching the skills of serving dying people for more than forty years and was named National Activist of the Year for his work with Shanti. Garfield has worked as a clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco (UCSF) for more than three decades. While on the faculty of the Cancer Research Institute at UCSF, he was one of the early contributors to the burgeoning field of psychosocial oncology. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, he is currently a research scholar at the Starr King School of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He also teaches courses on the end of life at the Metta Institute in San Francisco, where he is a founding faculty member of the training program for end-of-life counselors, and at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Garfield writes for and serves on the editorial board of Greater Good, a national e-magazine from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Science and the Greater Good.