Review..
A sometimes inspiring, sometimes quotidian guide to life, distilled from the experiences of people who faced death.
Most of what the dying discover (about themselves and about their lives) is “usually too late to apply,” according to Kübler-Ross, best known for On Death and Dying (1991). She and hospice-worker Kessler (The Rights of the Dying, not reviewed) hope to motivate readers to work on “unfinished business” before they approach the end. Based on their experiences, case histories generally take the form of “I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and learned a lesson. . . . ” These are the lessons, 15 in all, ranging in subject from love and loss through fear, anger, patience, and happiness. Many of them are variations on familiar, almost trite, themes: find your authentic self, express your anger, learn to receive as well as give, remember that forgiveness is good for the soul. Others challenge very basic assumptions: it is not true, we are told, that children learn to love from being loved by their parents—in fact, most children are not loved so much as rewarded for good behavior. Kübler-Ross’s own experience of pain (she is now partially paralyzed as a result of a stroke) adds depth to these lessons: she describes how she struggled with—and vehemently expressed—anger over her fate and is still unable to forgive some who took advantage of her helplessness to steal from her.
Over-the-counter remedies for spiritual malaise—but sometimes plain aspirin works better than more sophisticated prescriptions.
Life Lessons Quotes
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
-Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
-People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
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The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
-The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.
-it is very important that you only do what you love to do. you may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live your life as a prostitute, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived. and you will not have a pleasant death.
-There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.
-There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
-Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
-It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we niceties
-We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties.
-There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
-Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
-When I die I'm going to dance first in all the galaxies...I'm gonna play and dance and sing.
-positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.
-I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.
-Everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences.
-It is very important that you only do what you love to do. You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do .
Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business.
-If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers. We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives.
Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.
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Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
-Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our morality.
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Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body. Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment.
The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.
-It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
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Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.
-The beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
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