Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live [Paperback]

Marie De Hennezel (Author), Carol Janeway (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 1998

How do we learn to die? Most of us spend our lives avoiding that question, but this luminous book--a major best-seller in France--answers it with a directness and eloquence that are nothing less than transforming. As a psychologist in a hospital for the terminally ill in Paris, Marie de Hennezel has spent seven years tending to people who are relinquishing their hold on life. She tells the stories of her patients and their families. de Hennezel teaches us how to turn death--our loved ones' or our own--from something lonely and agonizing into a sacred passage. She discusses the importance of an honest reckoning, the value of ritual, the necessity of touch. In imparting these lessons, Intimate Death becomes a guide to living more fully, more intensely, than we had thought possible.



"Unique...Of all the books I have read about the endings of our lives, this elegiac testimony has taught me the most."--Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., author of How We Die


"The quiet, obvious truths [de Hennezel] discovers in her work--these things have a kind of cumulative power."--Washington Post Book World

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

French psychologist de Hennezel shows the dying how to live every last minute to the fullest. A best seller abroad.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Hennezel is a psychologist in a Paris hospital's palliative care unit for the terminally ill who also works with the dying at an AIDS hospice and in their homes. This book, a best-seller in France, is basically a journal of about a year of her professional life, which is no longer traditionally professional, for she has disposed of so-called professional distance. She perches on the edge of the bed when she first meets a new patient, and she freely holds and kisses her patients to assure them that they are not dying in solitude. She strives to learn what unfinished personal business they may have with family members, friends, or themselves and helps them conclude it. But if she gives much, she insists that she obtains even more: "true intimacy." Telling many stirring deathbed stories, Hennezel adds powerfully to the rising chorus (e.g., in part, M. Scott Peck's Denial of the Soul ) in favor of palliative care of the dying. Ray Olson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679768599
• ISBN-13: 978-0679768593
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #312,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unfinished Business, January 21, 2008

By 

Fred Clancey "Fred Clancey" (Boulder Colorado) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live (Paperback)

The subtitle "how the dying teach us how to live", had a unusually specific meaning for me. As I watched my emotional response and empathy to the conversations between Hennezel and terminally ill patients, I began to notice how many patients wanted to die earlier, not later, until, that is, their conversation with Hennezel. And, in each case, the patient was glad to have lived another few days, weeks or months because, during the conversations, they began to resolve some outstanding issues about their lives. Just as Hennezel helped them awaken to the value of attending to unfinished business, I too came to realize how much unfinished business I have myself. Or, put another way, I see the backlog of things-I've-hoped-to-do (since retirement) through the lens of "unfinished business."

The conversations between Hennezel and her terminally ill patients are invariably moving because of the warmth that Hennezel and the nurses on the staff extend to their patients. On pages 47-50 Hennezel refers to the field of Haptonomie (found in the French (but not the English) Wikipedia) associated with Frans Veldman which is about the importance of affection and human touch for "affectivity." This is as widely appreciated around child birth as it is under appreciated at the time of death (in the US at least). Hennezel and her co-workers implement this affectivity in their palliative unit for the dying and I think the articulation of that practice is much of what makes this book so emotionally moving, at least for me.

I can open the volume to any pages and within minutes I'm teary eyed. It's the depth of my emotional responses to the moving conversations that keeps me on my new track of attending to unfinished business. I dare not read the whole book in one setting -- perhaps 10 pages/week will keep me moving on what is genuinely a new path for me. I keep wanting to buy a crate of these books and hand them out on the street corner but, after the 1973 publication of Earnest Becker's The Denial of Death, I realized that issues surrounding death are not for everyone.

I wrote everything above almost a year ago but since returning to the book time and again, I now realize something I had not fully appreciated, viz., just how many people in palliative units are begging for an injection to enable them to die. If most adults fully realized how they will likely feel about dying once they approach those final days (in a first rate palliative unit as well as nursing homes with fewer resources), I suspect the laws against euthanasia would be off the books. I think that Becker's phrase, "denial of death," helps explain why euthanasia remains illegal in countries like the US. The inevitability of death gives meaning to life and Hennezel's excellent book facilitates greater presence to the death of others, to one's own mortality and, hence, the value of living.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I highly recommend this book, March 6, 1998

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[e-mail] (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimate Death: How the dying teach us how to live (Hardcover)

My mom has advanced cancer and is terminal. I was looking for something to help everyone in my family deal with it all. I was worried that some of the books I came across would be too depressing to give to my mom, but while of course I was sad alot while reading Intimate Death, it was also very uplifting and helpful. I'm really glad I read it *before* my mom dies.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars spiritual yet practical lesson about Death and Dying, January 18, 1998

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[e-mail] (princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimate Death: How the dying teach us how to live (Hardcover)

A very powerful book .Spiritual, philosophical,yet very practical for the dying and the survivors.A great teacher about death and dying,de Hennezel leaves you with a powerful lesson about life