Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying?
In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was...