Description: "No One Dies Alone" offers accessible insights, practical tools, and personal stories to provide a sense of community, profound relief, and deep meaning for both caregiver and patient through illness, death, and bereavement.
Brief description: Dr. Lani Leary has over twenty-five years of experience as a psychotherapist working with chronically ill, dying, and bereaved clients. She served as the director of mental health services at Whitman Walker AIDS clinic, as a professor of Death Studies at George Mason University, and as a researcher at the National Cancer Institute of NIH. Leary also garners wisdom from her personal experience--her mother's death when she was a child, her father's death from cancer, her own profound near-death experience--and has sat with over 500 people as they died.
Dr. Leary has spoken nationally at over 250 conferences, writes a bereavement column for www.healingthespirit.org, and is the author of Healing Hands an international, bestselling audiotape on therapeutic touch and pain management.Review Quotes: Publisher's Weekly Review:
Leary, a psychotherapist and professor of death studies, has written an extraordinarily clear-eyed and helpful guide for those who must care for a dying loved one, an almost unavoidable and challenging situation. Leary brings both the personal experience of her parents' deaths--two very different situations at different times in her life--as well as two and a half decades' professional experience working with the dying and the bereaved. Caregivers almost always begin the journey of caregiving not knowing what to do or say; Leary offers both information and comfort for them. Half the book deals with caregiving for the dying, and the second part concerns itself with the bereavement process; several appendixes list varieties of resources. Leary respects both the patterns within and the uniqueness of the processes of letting go and grieving. She provides a public service; this book is strongly recommended for libraries. (Apr.)