Tag: Review

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Some help with your death

I’d like to share with you a wonderful review of The Amateur’s Guide To Death and Dying; Enhancing the End of Life posted this morning on Bill’s ‘Faith Matters’ Blog.  Thank you, Bill!

Bill Tammeus, the author of the blog, is the former Faith section columnist for The Kansas City Star. He came to The Star in 1970 as a reporter, spent nearly 27 years on the paper’s editorial page and then moved his column in March 2004 to the weekly Faith section. He took formal retirement in mid-2006 but continued as Faith section columnist on a freelance basis until mid-November 2008. In addition to this daily blog, Bill writes columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter.

In America’s death-denying culture, the reality that death awaits all of us seems to sneak up on lots of people and catch them off guard.

And yet, as I have insisted to readers over and over for decades, if you don’t understand your own death you’ll never understand your own life.

What I bring you today is some remarkable help in exactly that — understanding your own death. It’s a new book (well, workbook might be a better term) called The Amateur’s Guide to Death and Dying: Enhancing the End of Life, by Richard Wagner.

Wagner. a former Catholic priest, is a psychotherapist who founded and now is executive director of PARADIGM Programs, Inc., a nonprofit that works to help people with end-of-life matters.

What Wagner does in this book is walk readers through the experience of being part of a group for 10 weeks, discussing death and dying for two hours at a time.

Now, of course, readers aren’t physically with the composite characters (meaning fictional but based on reality) of Jan, Michael, Holly, Raymond, Clare, Kevin, Max, Mia, Raul and Robin as they talk about their own situations.

But after a time readers will feel as if they know them quite well and have compassion for what each of them is going through.

Wagner also brings experts to the group meetings to deal with various subjects related to death and dying. I thought his chapter on spirituality and religion was quite helpful. The discussion was led by the Rev. David Pattee, who is not a composite character at all but a Unitarian-Universalist pastor.

As you might expect, Wagner has the composite characters in this discussion be from all over the lot when it comes to religious experience. Some are detached from any faith commitment, others are angry at God, others rely on faith to get them through each day.

Somewhere in the midst of all that readers may well find themselves and find some help in grasping how various religious traditions deal with death and dying.

Facing our own mortality can be a sobering and jarring experience, but it’s something each of us must do if we hope to bring our life to any kind of coherent conclusion.

I see Wagner’s book as an excellent tool to help people of all ages with that task. I could see this book being used in various faith communities as a study guide for small groups led by competent lay leaders or clergy.

And the time to engage in this sort of facing-death discipline is well before you think you need it.

Complete Posting HERE!

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REVIEW — In Gumbo, The Grail Connection Newsletter

Marian Ronan:
The Amateur’s Guide to Death and Dying: Enhancing the End of Life, by Richard Wagner, Ph.D. Las Vegas, NV: Nazca Plains, 2012. 431 pp.

Well, it’s happening. The baby-boomers are becoming senior citizens. I joined Medicare and got my half-price MTA card in April. My husband has retired and we’re planning a trip to Paris.

But getting older isn’t all sweetness and light. Even as Keith and I are packing, my best friend from college has checked into a hospice in Toronto, her metastatic breast cancer exploding throughout her body. Ten or twenty years ago I would have characterized this as a catastrophe. Increasingly, it’s the new normal.

Apparently we Americans put a lot of energy into avoiding this “darker” side of getting older. Clinical psychologist Richard Wagner (actually I’m a psychotherapist, clinical sexologist) has extensive experience helping people to come to terms with their own deaths and the deaths of those they love, so he’s written a workbook for the rest of us: The Amateur’s Guide to Death and Dying.

The chapters of The Amateur’s Guide are structured around ten sessions of the death and dying support groups that the author leads professionally in Northern California. Ten fictional group members, composites of actual participants, interact with one another, telling their stories, and engaging the material that Wagner and other experts present. Forms are also provided for us, the readers, to respond to the materials, provide feedback, even evaluate the contents and process of the workshop.

Among the death and dying-related subjects the book/workshop addresses are fear and avoidance of the reality of death, dealing with regrets and old wounds, end-of -life documents and preparations like advance directives, wills and trusts, who to notify, distribution of your possessions, etc., spirituality in death and dying, sexuality and intimacy in the dying process, and what someone’s last weeks and days are actually like.

Reading the responses of the various group members to the presentations and assignments helps to make this material real. But doing the assignments yourself makes death and dying all the more palpable. I was surprised at how deeply moved—and disturbed—I was as I did the various exercises, for example, writing my own obituary and describing the last weeks and days of my own life. This may not be true for everyone, but for me, engaging the prospect of my death was a sobering experience. But I feel I am better for it.

No book is perfect, of course. For the first half of the book, I found it almost impossible to keep the ten members of the group straight in my head. I finally made a crib sheet with the name, age, and a brief description of each, which I printed out and kept inside the front cover. The publisher should send out a bookmark with such information on it when someone buys a copy of The Amateur’s Guide so that readers can consult it as each group member begins to “talk.” The book is also pretty large—the cover is eight by ten inches and the book is an inch thick—which made it hard for me to take on the subway, where I do a lot of my reading.

But this is quibbling. The Amateur’s Guide to Death and Dying makes a valuable contribution to helping readers come to terms with an aspect of life that too many of us tend to avoid. Grail groups around the country would do well to use it to help members begin—or continue—to deal with the reality of death

Marian Ronan blog: An American Catholic on the Margins of World Christianity.