Encountering Life's Endings
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About the Book
If you wish to live well, practice dying. Death and dying are universal human experiences. All that lives is transitory and will depart this life. Encountering Life’s Endings encompasses the practical, psychological, philosophical, cultural and spiritual aspects of dying and death viewed through the prism of the passing of the author’s mother (94), father (89), brothers Al (69), Joe (46), Eddie (44) and numerous friends and colleagues. Interspersed throughout the book are the thoughts and insights of leading figures in the field of thanatology as well as diverse and illuminating teachings by eastern and western sages and spiritual teachers, ranging from Thich Nhat Hanh to Stanley Keleman.
Readers are provided with meditations and visualizations that serve to lessen the pain and suffering associated with death and dying, thus enhancing the possibility of experiencing the last stages of our lives as a final gift to self and others. Other types of life’s endings are also dealt with in this book. For example, the death of love; facing the possible death of a child, the necessity of allowing parts of ourselves to die in order to be more fully alive; birth as a form of dying; letting go of pain and suffering in order to experience pleasure; the casting off of normality to attain sanity; and the dying of the earth,
Written largely in the form of a personal narrative, hearts will open, emitting compassion for all sentient beings, and minds engaged, resulting in the deepening of how we think about, approach and experience the ebb and flow of our lives.
Louis Silverstein’s Encountering Life’s Endings: Practice Dying Live Well offers compelling testimony about basic but overlooked truths. As someone who has experienced the tragic, untimely death of a child, I have searched far and wide for words that would help me to process and recover from such profound loss. With beautifully descriptive prose, Silverstein provides guidance and wisdom, delving deeply into what is for the most part unspeakable in Western culture—the relationship between life and death. It is a gentle and honest book that weaves personal narrative with illuminating teachings from a variety of spiritual writers that provide the tools for transforming suffering into strength.
Studies, University of Delaware
In his fearless exploration into the meaning of dying and death, Louis weaves his way through a maze of tragic historic and current family losses, makings stops along the way in a sensuous paradise of philosophic wisdom. The answers found and the meanings revealed are richly satisfying, as is the journey through the book.
In this personal account of meeting the death of others, Silverstein brings to light how we can imagine dying and wonder about our own. People will be moved by this book and gain insights.
If you wish to live fully, practice dying is the Platonic advice that grounds much of Louis Silverstein’s pithy and personal guide for turning our fears of death and dying into explorations of the of the arts of living: forgiveness, creativity and love. Reflecting on his years of study and teaching and his own experiences with death and dying in his family, he offers us insight into how death awakens emotional and spiritual reserves that not only open the gates of grief and provide healing, but also miraculously shatter the life-long patterns of thinking that contributes to the real tragedy in life-- death of our spirit.
About the Author
Louis Silverstein is a Professor of Liberal Education at Columbia College Chicago where he teaches courses in Peace Studies, Dying & Death, Education, Culture & Society, and Drugs & Culture (forthcoming). His studies, theoretical and experiential, of transformative consciousness and alternative realities have been of long duration, encompassing four decades—1960’s to the present, and have taken him to settings throughout the U.S., and to Jamaica, Costa Rica, Canada and numerous European countries.