A Beginner's Guide to Dying
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- $189.00
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- $189.00
Descripción editorial
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Lessons for all of us in how to approach life—from someone in the process of dying. • "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality." —Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, author of Nothing to Fear
In his mid-40s, aid worker Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer—it had been caught too late, and spread throughout his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live—optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritizing what really matters in life. Deemed “a funny, touching meditation on death” by the Sunday Times, this warm and wise book offers lessons for all of us in how to approach life.
The advice includes: “Do get in touch, but don’t just turn up unaccounted,” and “Do listen, but don’t minimize things.” And just as wisely: “to exist is to have won the lottery of life.”
This remarkable book, a runaway bestseller in the UK, is not just a meditation on dying, but also a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying is destined to become a modern classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this candid collection, late British aid worker Boas muses on life and death in the wake of his terminal throat cancer diagnosis. Expanding on three articles he wrote for the Jersey Post following his diagnosis at age 46, the author discusses meditation, gratitude, religion, and—in an especially valuable section—how to interact with those who are dying (readers should take care to listen well; acknowledge the elephant in the room without harping on it; and refrain from forcing a "final farewell"—which often occurs for the catharsis of the visitor, not the dying person). Most of the account meditates on what it means to live fully in the light of death, and Boas's solid if somewhat predictable advice to seize the day is enriched by his wry humor and moments of genuine insight, as when he discusses being comforted by the interconnectedness of humanity and the idea of the world going on without him: "Children will want ice creams and people will fall head-over-heels in love and musicians will delight us.... I find the contemplation of other selves to be... enormously moving." This poignant volume inspires.
