The necessity of a book like Leaves of Love has emerged thanks to our age denying, death defying culture and the all-powerful medical system that ensures most of our elders are cared for by strangers and our dying, rarely happens at home. To live out our carefully gained later years, with a feeling of abandonment, the ache of loss, bored and lonely is the most tragic and largely unacknowledged outcome of ‘progress’ in medicine; role models in the gentle art of coming in close, listening with attention and loving deeply are a rarity.
Dying is the only experience we will all share. It makes sense to learn about it, prepare for it and make it as good as it possibly can be, while we can. Between ‘knowing and going’ can be a time of great transformation.
“It is the twilight zone between past, present and future that is the precarious world of transformation.”
Marion Woodman