Our Greatest Gift
A book by Henri Nouwen came to mind this week. It's entitled "Our Greatest Gift: A Meditaion on Dying and Caring" Perhaps it was brought on by the merging experiences of the past few weeks of the Pope's passing and my very good friend Jimmy's mother struggling with cancer.

Here are some quotes from the book that stood out to me:

"I am convinced that it is this joy - joy of being the same as others, of belonging to one human family - that allows us to die well. I do not know how I or anyone else could be prepared to die if we were mainly concerned about trophies we had collected during our best years. The great gift hidden in our dying is the gift of unity with all people. However different we are, we are all born powerless, and we all die powerless, and the little differences we live in between dwindle in the light of this enourmous truth."


" A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity. If we live toward death as an event that seperates us from people, death cannot be other than a sad and sorrowful event. But if we grow in awareness that our mortality, more than anything else, will lead us into solidarity with others, then death can become a celebration of our unity with the human race."