The Last Passage: Recovering a Death of Your Own

By Donald Heinz

Book Overview

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying?
In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was seen as an important spiritual task--perhaps the most important task of our lives. Heinz argues that we can reconceive of death, reinvest it with meaning, and save it from becoming a meaningless biological event. Seeking appropriate models for such a reconstruction, Heinz offers a fascinating overview of the many ways death has been envisioned and ritualized throughout human history, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to 15th century Christian ars moriendi--manuals on the art of dying--and from Jean Paul Sartre to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He also surveys the more recent contributions of psychologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and death awareness advocates, whose efforts have largely failed to integrate death into a larger human story and the larger human community.
Finally, Heinz shows us how we might create rituals through the use of music, visual arts, dance, drama, and language that would enable us to approach death with reverence, as the spiritual consummation of our lives.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195116437
• ISBN13: 9780195116434
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The Last Passage

Not since Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning book:The Denial of Death has a better book on death be written. Heinz polymathic and impassioned book transcends most "mortal" books on death in its richness and insight. Heinz pulls together insights from history,poetry,psychology,anthropology,literature,theology,philosophy, thanatology in examining the current failures of the American way of death and offers creative solutions that link the individual embedded in society to more humaninzing ways of death.Well worth reading over and over again.