Encouraging,
inspiring, and practical, The Grace in Aging invites all those who have ever
experienced spiritual longing to awaken in their twilight years. Since aging,
in and of itself, does not lead to spiritual maturity, The Grace in Aging
suggests and explores causes and conditions that we can create in our lives,
just as we are living them, to allow awakening to unfold—transforming the
predictable sufferings of aging into profound opportunities for growth in
clarity, love, compassion, and peace.
In
Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of
his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of
its ending.
Gawande,
a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing
that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande
offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the
infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to
demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
San Francisco's Laguna Honda
Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu
(God's Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and
rock musicians, professors and thieves-"anyone who had fallen, or, often,
leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So
did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna
Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a
kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place
transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the
body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea,
of the body as a garden to be tended. [Victoria Sweet has a PhD in the healing philosophy of Hildegard of Bingen the 11th Century Benedictine Abbess. I personally found this a fascinating aspect of her work and her writing.]
