Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live

In this intensely personal, luminous report, a bestseller in France, Hennezel, a Parisian psychologist, discusses her work with patients in a palliative care unit at a hospital for the terminally ill, as well as her care of AIDS and HIV-positive patients at another hospital. She assists Danielle, stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease, a paralysis-inducing neuromuscular disorder, who believes her illness is rooted in her childhood fear of abandonment, and who reconnects with her twin sister. Blending compassion with clinical insight, Hennezel conducts Jungian dream analysis with Louis, a close friend dying of AIDS, and with Dmitri, an elderly Russian emigre cancer victim who strongly believes in reincarnation. Sometimes her efforts to help patients overcome fear, to reconnect with their true feelings, to reconcile with loved ones, are inconclusive. Yet more often than not, her patients die with serenity and strength. Her conviction that acceptance of death makes us ever more aware of ourselves, of other people and of the world animates her beautifully controlled, inspirational narrative. 40,000 first printing. (Feb.)