Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows

Abstract A natural companion volume to the author’s How We Grieve: Relearning the World and The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love, this volume’s fourteen previously published and nine new pieces trace significant developments in the author’s nearly fifty years of reflection. As a philosopher, he is a seeker of wisdom. The dying and bereaved and their helpers seek wisdom, too, not science, about how to live and how to care. The book captures the author’s best thinking about the nature of the self (weblike, inherently grounded, social, and interdependent); ego, soul, and spirit; spirituality and religion; suffering, brokenness, and sorrow; loss of assumptive world; grieving as relearning the world; anticipatory grieving; loving in separation; hope and resilience; ethics in care of the dying and bereaved; rational suicide among the terminally ill; criticism of evidence-based practice as a model for grief-counseling; a wisdom-based model for grief-counseling; and sorrow-friendly practices for self-care.