Dying Is Not Death

Lee Hoinacki is an observer, thinker and teacher. He writes about modern society from his Catholic faith perspective, but does not force his views on the reader. Dying is not Death are his thoughts about how he sees modern society dealing with death. He gives us examples : his father, his brother, friends, a community in Mexico where he lived and others. The book's bibliography is extensive. The notes had me going to Wiki and Google all the time. It was a class and I learnt.

"[T]o be human is to work out and practice one's own art of suffering," Lee Hoinacki writes in his most recent book. "But the medical system substitutes mechanical and drug fixes for the continual struggle needed to exercise an art." Through moving stories about how people close to him - his father, his brother, and his long-time friend Ivan Illich - faced suffering and death, Hoinacki illuminates ways in which this forgotten art can be practiced even in the modern technological world. To those who struggled to understand why Illich insisted on living with a great tumor on his cheek - what he simply referred to as "my bump," he helps us to grasp his (and Hoinacki's) rejection of the pursuit of health as a modern fetish preventing us from being fully alive. Weaving together narrative and interpretation based upon Catholic faith, Hoinacki shows how living, suffering, and dying are all one. How can one attempt to live as a human being in a world dominated by the medicalization of existence? "The one action clearly open to me is to say 'NO,'" Hoinacki tells us. "No, I will not obey. I will not make myself compatible with the program. This may be a necessary absolute today to begin to live humanly, and to the degree possible, autonomously and virtuously." To those who aspire to living as an art - even if a largely lost one - Dying is Not Death is a beacon that shows a way through the dense technological systems of modern existence. David B. Schwartz