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Dear Reader,
A writer, hospice chaplain, and mother in South Carolina, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and the author of a new book, On Living, Kerry Egan is today's guest author.
Kerry's hospice work has been featured on PBS and CNN, and her essays have appeared in various publications. Kerry was recently interviewed by Terry Gross about her new book, On Living for the NPR program, Fresh Air.
Email: kerry@kerryegan.com say hello, and welcome her back to the book club.
Thanks for visiting with us today Kerry...
As a hospice chaplain, I've met with hundreds of people who are nearing death. Sometimes we say prayers together. Sometimes we sing hymns. But most of the time, patients talk about their lives.
As a chaplain, my job is to help people find or make meaning in their lives. No one comes completely unprepared for the task. Every person comes to the end life, and to this final spiritual work, with a rich assortment of experiences, relationships, beliefs and strengths to help them. A spiritual toolbox, if you will. But some people's toolbox is fuller, with a greater assortment of tools for the job.
Religion and personal faith are an important piece, of course. But they are not the only tools people have.
For many of my patients, the most important tool they had as they worked to make meaning of their lives were the books they had read over a lifetime. Yes, sometimes, these books were explicitly religious--scripture, devotionals, theology, spiritual autobiographies. But just as often, their minds wandered back to the novels and poems they read when they were young adults, or the histories and memoirs they read in middle aged. On occasion, it was something even more unexpected. One man found, of all things, the business book Who Moved My Cheese? to be the book that helped him make sense of what he had experienced in his life. It was the single best tool in his spiritual toolbox to help him find meaning in a way that nothing else did.
Sometimes, patients remember the comic books and pulp thrillers they loved as teenagers. And sometimes, it's the books of their childhood they go back to, finally understanding the wisdom of those old, beloved books in completely new ways. One patient found the greatest solace and wisdom in the book The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown, a book her mother read to her almost seventy years ago. A book I read to my children over and over again when they were toddlers.
I'm a mother of two school-aged children now. I sometimes hear other moms and even teachers worry about the quality of the books their kids read. They wish their kids read more serious books, more difficult books, or books that would make them learn more.
I'm not a teacher, and I can't comment on the educational value of Diary of a Wimpy Kid or the teenage romances.
But I can promise you that someday there will be another hospice chaplain, eighty years from now, who will sit and listen to her patients talk about the one book that gave them hope, the one book that gave them peace, the one book that helped them discern what love is and what it is not.
So keep reading. You never know which will be the book you'll need a lifetime from now.
--Kerry Egan
Email: kerry@kerryegan.com say hello, and welcome her back to the book club.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA, by Stendhal. Start reading now and be sure to enter the drawing for your chance to win a Penguin tote bag: http://www.supportlibrary.com/bc/v.cfm?L=drclassqqxqR1AFEAEE9442&c=CLASSICS
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