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How to Start an End-of-Life Book Club in Your Community

If you are interested in overcoming our society’s fear of death and improving the way we handle the dying process, you might consider starting a year-long end-of-life book club in your community. It may sound excessive to spend an entire year reading and talking about death, but remember that Tibetans begin preparing for death as soon as they reach adulthood—surely we can dedicate one year to our own preparations for the end-of-life.

In our society death is shoved into the background of our lives and goes largely unexamined until circumstances force us to pay attention. And by that time it is often too late to make meaningful choices for our life and our death and we end up receiving the default end-of-life care resorted to by our healthcare system: overtreatment and overly “medicalized” care.

Edward Morgan once wrote, “A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.” Since there is no more fragile thought for most of us than death, a book can be the perfect place to study the process, learn all of death’s angles and edges, and discover the choices and options that are the best fit for us.

Read the Huffington Post article here!