The Grace in Dying

September 28, 1998
Singh, a hospice worker with training in psychology and an avid interest in religion, here combines a Kubler-Ross-like approach to death and dying with an Eastern religious take on finitude. She questions our sense of death as an "outrage" and her book is filled with the cornerstones of Buddhism and Tibetan religion, ideas that provide no easy comfort ("Our fear of death is grounded in a strong sense of the `I'"). Some of Singh's consolations are not as strong-minded as this analysis of the ego, however. Occasionally, she uses insights that are hardly transcendent ("As we enter the Nearing Death Experience, both emotion and cognition clear.... Beatitudes flow naturally from our being, now a vehicle for of Spirit"). She is at her most perceptive when she seeks to explain why death is so frightening to us: "We are able to maintain the illusion of a separate self... able to maintain it until we enter death row. The moment we receive a terminal prognosis is the moment that fiction begins to transform into documentary." Singh works with terminal patients and can give careful accounts of dying bodies and minds, yet she also notes that the living in fact have no idea what death is like. Nonetheless, her book serves a wise and moving expression of the living helping the dying and should give solace to those facing death as well as to their friends and family.