Dying: A Guide for Helping and Coping

Anyone facing a terminal prognosis--as helper, friend, relative, patient or health-care professional-- will find useful lessons in psychiatrist Shepard's look at how to deal well with impending death. Patients want to know how others have felt; family members want to know what to do. Some health-care professionals could use advice on what to disclose, and how, and to whom, and when. Most of the volume alternates straightforward advice--couched so as to reach a broad audience--with brief interviews with patients or their intimates. A law student now recovering from a malignant melanoma recollects his diagnosis and surgery. A 65-year-old contractor with myeloma illustrates how ""one can... know the truth and still be optimistic."" ""Karen,"" a nurse, describes how she has coped with Hodgkin's disease--and how her husband seems to have practiced denial. And a cheery middle-aged nun explains, in fairly ecumenical terms, how she takes care of herself and keeps her outlook bright. Shepard (Fritz) includes an invaluable, if brief, section on the legal, practical and financial aspects of dying and being a survivor--wills, insurance, pensions, planning a funeral. Hospice care deserves and gets its own chapter; so does bereavement--""Deborah"" describes the aftermath of her father's suicide; ""David"" describes his life as a widowed single parent. Boxed quotes and last words from famous and semifamous artists, wits and thinkers (Shakespeare, Browning, F.H. Bradley) adorn every chapter--leading up to a concluding section of meditations penned by Shepard himself: e.g., ""None of us will ever get out of this world alive."" Several chapters of this admirable book feature line drawings by Shepard's father, who died in 1972, soon after completing them. Large print edition rights sold to Thorndike. (July) FYI: Shepard is the cofounder and copublisher of the Permanent Press.