What Does It Feel Like to Die?: Inspiring New Insights into the Experience of Dying

In case the title didn’t tip you off, this is a morbid book; it’s hard to read for long stretches. But it feels morbid and hard to read because as a culture we would rather do almost anything than talk and think about death, especially not our own. Our aversion has flourished under this taboo–I couldn’t, for example, talk to my friends about the book because it made them too uncomfortable. In other words, this is a needed book. As we all too well know, death is not only one of the few things that every living creature will experience, it’s also, despite our many, many protestations, inevitable.

Fortunately, the authors are well aware of our general squeamishness and are as gentle as possible in leading the reader through the conversation. They have years of experience working with hospice patients and have done extensive research into the biological and psychic experience of death. And they’re entirely persuasive in their insistence that (our) death needs to be a normal and regular(ish) topic of conversation. Neither hiding from it nor denying it does the slightest thing to delay or stop it, so we might as well stop King-Lear-shouting-into-the-storm-ing. This book is well researched, articulate, and very sympathetic to the fear most readers bring to it. Highly recommended.