“Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond: A Practical Primer to Help You and Your Loved Ones Prepare Medically, Legally and Emotionally fort the End of Life” (Random House, New York, 2/09, 297 pp. $26.)
Because of understandable human reluctance to confront our own mortality, the issues of death and dying hold scant appeal to most authors.
Fewer still approach the dreaded subjects with even a modicum of humor.
Now we have a definitive treatise on our eventual demise and extinction from Jane Brody, the best-selling author and beloved, highly-esteemed health columnist for The New York Times, giving us her take on the urgency and necessity of making adequate preparations for our final exit.
She delivers a delightfully disarming directory in which she studiously avoids dwelling on the morbid and morose and, in conformity with her light touch, comes replete with a most generous sprinkling of clever and creative cartoons regarding the Grim Reaper.
Don’t Forget It Is Inevitable
She argues that we live in a death-defying, death-denying culture, that we need constant reminders no cure exists for mortality, and that we must overcome avoidance and denial.
Only then, she says, can we move on to acceptance and preparation for a departure that is peaceful, comfortable and even celebratory.
However, procrastinating until the bitter end will make the task of facing death that much harder, perhaps even impossible to accomplish.
The volume includes such handy, down-to-earth help as sample forms for a living will (only 1 in 5 Americans has taken this essential step), how to sign up for organ and body donations (only 25 percent of Americans have done this vis-a-vis 90 percent of Europeans), and how to prepare a properly-executed will with instructions clearly spelling out funeral or cremation arrangements.
A Guide to Other Helpers
Another major benefit of this invaluable roadmap provides especially numerous quotations and references to other works and websites about the myriad topics covered.
In one of the writer's most useful and enlightening sections, she traces the history of the hospice movement, which came to our shores from England only in 1971.
Besides furnishing contacts for finding the nearest available hospice care, she explains how the network has expanded to embrace in-home hospice care, contingent on at least one primary caregiver on the premises.
Ms. Brody also underscores how woefully underutilized this near-ubiquitous supportive and uplifting service has been and how family members usually wait far too long to seek this beneficial boost to help manage end-of-life concerns.
Other standouts among her 18 chapters deal with how to handle the legally-thorny question of PAS (physician assisted suicide), illegal in almost all of our states, grief and bereavement issues and the highly-charged, emotional problem of the death of children. She admits that researching this area caused her much anguish.
To her great credit, Ms. Brody makes no attempt to evaluate or even speculate about the age-old conundrum of survival beyond the grave.
But, in a full chapter on spiritual care, she comments that humanists can find dying as fearful as anyone else. Their needs are not fewer, just different from those of religious believers.
She neatly elucidates the distinction between religiosity and spirituality by describing how the latter can encompass a person's relationship with nature embodied in just the simple act of looking at trees and with art, music, family or community—a far cry from dogma or creed so germane to all religious belief about our fate in the Great Beyond.
The writer nicely summarizes the primary goal of this helpful survey with these encouraging words:
“However old you are now, don't be afraid to face the inevitable, which I hope will be as distant from the present as possible.
“Because once you've taken care of the end of life, you'll be in a far better position to fully enjoy the time you have left.”
Mr. Akerley, a Culver City resident, may be contacted at benakerley@aol.com
