Meetings at the Edge: Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying, the Healing and the Healed

I read this book on many airplane trips back and forth from Berkeley, where I was running a small business, to Sante Fe, where my brother was dying much too young of pancreatic cancer. Reading the stories of other people's encounters with impossible loss helped me find the courage and sense of wonder that I needed to keep from being burried by the grief. It is a great comfort and bringer of strength to see how others have done what you must do. I couldn't recommend this book more highly.

Stephen Levine was for several years the Director of the Hanuman Foundation Death and Dying Project (wording may not be exactly right). In this capacity, he and his wife, Ondrea, kept their home telephone open 24 hours a day, as a "hotline" for people in catastrophic situations involving death, dying, and extreme grief. The transcripts printed out in this book are nothing short of amazing. They show what is possible, when one's mind has been stilled by meditation (or for an "old soul" like Stephen, but that place is there somewhere in each of us), and one's heart is receptive and in a place of love. Many of us feel embarrassed of frightened by death. Stephen shows that honest, loving acknowledgement of the person's situation is a prerequisite before healing (of attitudes, mainly..physical healing may or may *not* follow, the Levines say) can happen. He goes straight to the heart of callers' situations, including those of a parent whose child was recently murdered, another parent whose child was washed away at sea and the body never found, and of many people who themselves are approaching death. He has the courage to be direct, and the compassion to be gentle (the ability to give a little "tougher love", too, when needed, always appropriate to the person's strength and capacity). And AMAZING transformations follow. Stephen is able to give people a space for their emotions, that they were often not previously able to give themselves. The book shows that it is possible to have a spiritual presence that is "contagious"..that is, that others can derive strength from, and use as a starting point to accept their own situations. Seeing that such usefulness is possible for one human being to develop in himself, any even "moderately caring soul" who reads MEETINGS AT THE EDGE will keep Stephen's example at least in the back of his/her mind until he/she has become able to actualize such compassion and service in his/her own life.