Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, The
Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying demonstrates how people try to cope
with the inevitability of death. Different cultures, informed by
religious beliefs and sometimes desperate hope, teach people to respond
to their own death and the deaths of others in modes as various as
defiance, stoic resignation, and unbridled grief. In addition to
examples from literature, poetry, and religious texts, Father Richard
John Neuhaus provides an intensely personal account of his encounter
with death through emergency cancer surgery and reflects on how that
encounter has changed the way he lives. While many writers have deplored
the "denial of death" in our culture, The Eternal Pity shows how
themes of death and dying are nevertheless perennial and pervasive.
Society may be viewed as a disorganized march of multitudes waving
little banners of meaning before the threat of nonbeing that is death.
Some selections in this book depict people utterly surprised by their
mortality; others highlight how the whole of one's life can be a
preparation for what used to be called "a good death." For some, life is
a relentless effort to hold death at bay; for others, death is, although
not welcomed, reflectively anticipated. Nothing so universally defines
the human condition as the fact that we shall die. The Eternal Pity
helps us to understand how the prospect of death compels decisions about
how we might live.
