Karen Speerstra was a writer, editor, and author of ten books. She died shortly after completing the manuscript for this spiritually sensitive book. It contains excerpts from her hospice journal, which reveal death as a teacher who has wisdom to pass on to those who are dying. She opens it with "Like Alice, I feel as if I've fallen through the rabbit hole." Speerstra and Herbert Anderson, a pastor and hospital chaplain, have also included a very helpful section titled "From the Caregiver's Guidebook."
Hospice care offers a place for a person to die in peace with as little pain as possible. Speerstra elaborates: "When Goethe was about to die, he cried out, 'Light, the world needs more light.' Many years later, the philosopher Unamuno reacted to Goethe and said, 'No, Goethe was wrong. What he should have said was 'warmth, the world needs more warmth.' We shall not die from the dark but from the cold.' Hospice seeks to provide such warmth by creating places of safety and comfort by ensuring easy access to family and friends."
Speerstra seems to agree with Goethe's fascination with dark and light. She thinks one thing we should do is get rid of our prejudices against darkness by which we equate it with death and monsters prowling around us. Study of the mystics is another way of honoring the dark and the mysterious.
It is hard to wrap our minds around the complexities and the paradoxes of death and dying. Speerstra reminds us that it is best to embrace the contradictions of our last human act. In addition, there is solace in letting go of our rigid ideas about the afterlife. Or as Rainer Maria Rilke put it: "Death is the side of life which is turned away from us and upon which we shed no light."
Other subjects covered in this resource include the patience that is needed as one waits to die, the trust that must be put in others to take care of you, taking time to celebrate the ordinary, the need to share memories and tell stories of your experiences, letting go of control and enslavement to rigid ideas, dealing with the flow of emotions and moods, saying goodbye to those we love, and using rituals.
