Facing Death and Finding Hope: A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying

By Christine Longaker. Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1997. [262 pp.]

Reviewed by: Meg Wickes, Hospice Volunteer.

The Foreword to this book is by Sogyal Rinpoche, one of the author's mentors in her lifelong study of Tibetan Buddhism. It opens with these words quoted from the medieval Book of the Craft of Dying: "Learn to die and thou shalt learn to live. There shall none learn how to love that hath not learned to die." This book elaborates on this theme while at the same time calling on practical insights clearly derived from Kubler-Ross.

The author, following the death of her husband, moved to Northern California with her young son and enrolled in Community Studies at the University of Santa Cruz. While there she developed her interest in death and dying, became intensely involved with the Hospice program there and at the same time she began studying and practicing in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

For over twenty years she has been immersed in these two parallel passions, educating caregivers, the bereaved and persons facing death, at the same time searching for "enlightenment" and liberation from "suffering paths" for herself. For the author, the two paths represent her own highest aspiration in which she struggles to become "free of herself" in order to be able to genuinely give herself to others. She gives credit to Kubler-Ross as her mentor in Hospice matters along with her spiritual "directors," Sogyal Rinpoche and Dzogchen Rinpoche, who have, themselves, recently introduced into their teaching a program on Spiritual Care for Living and Dying.

The author is careful to point out that her message is cast in terms broad enough to meet the need of all religions. None, she insists, should shy away because of her own devotion to a particular Buddhist Way. There is much of the author's experience in this comprehensive "Handbook" on caregiving as spiritual practice.