Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, The
Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying demonstrates how people have
tried to cope with the inevitability of death. Different cultures,
informed by religious belief and sometimes desperate hope, teach
people to respond to their own death and the death of others in
modes as various as defiance, stoic resignation, and grief
unbridled to the point of exhaustion. 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 the
changes that encounter has made in the way he lives.
While some contemporary writers have deplored the "denial of
death" in our culture, The Eternal Pity shows how themes of death
and dying are perennial and pervasive, although not always made
entirely specific. Society may be viewed as a disorganized march of
multitudes waving little banners of meaning in the face of the
threat of non-being that is death. Some selections in this book
reveal 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 that final indignity
compels a variety of decisions about how we might live.
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