Making Peace with Death and Dying:
A Practical Guide to Liberating Ourselves from the Death Taboo
“Judith Johnson brings decades of experience working with the dying and their loved ones to this extraordinary, much-needed book about how to confront our mortality with open-hearted curiosity and mindful awareness. Intelligent, wise, and gracefully written, her work deserves a place on your shelf beside Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and Sogyal Rinpoche’s, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I could not recommend it more highly..”
-Mark Matousek, Author of When You’re Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living
“Making Peace with Death and Dying is the fulfillment of the author’s deathbed promise to her mother to help others make peace with death.”With refreshing honesty, she exposes cultural taboos and helps us to examine limiting core beliefs and discover how to transform our relationship to death.”
-Frank Ostaseski, Founder & Director of Metta Institute and author of The Five Invitations
Discover the nine keys that transform your relationship with death.
Explore and evolve your perspective on this essential part of life’s journey through a series of thought-provoking exercises included in the text.
Learn to:
- appreciate death as a natural last event in life and a normally occurring, everyday experience
- be of greater service to the dying and grieving
- allow mortality to embolden you to live with greater purpose and passion
- be more peaceful in the presence of death
- approach death on your own terms with wisdom and competency
When you break free of the death taboo, you are gifted with the ability to live and die with greater authenticity and dignity.
In Making Peace with Death and Dying, Judith Johnson offers a new understanding of what is possible in our relationship with death once we break free of our culture’s stifling death taboo.
Her analysis of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of the taboo make clear how it perpetuates fear and avoidance as our primary responses to death. Too many of the 2.8 million Americans dying each year, and those who love and care for them, suffer through the experience emotionally isolated, frightened, and unprepared spiritually, emotionally, and practically.
By failing to embrace the full depth and breadth of the human experience, our culture leaves us ill-equipped for living and dying with profound authenticity and competence.
Readers are guided through an exploration and evolution of their perspective on this essential part of life’s journey through a series of thought-provoking exercises included in the text.
Making Peace with Death and Dying is the fulfillment of the author’s deathbed promise to her mother to help others make peace with death.
Praise for Making Peace with Death and Dying
“Judith Johnson offers important guidelines for dealing with death and dying, and she urges us all to prepare ourselves and assist others in a caring and intelligent way. You can sense how her heart has been educated by experience as she explores many facets of dying in the contemporary world.”
-Thomas Moore, author of the bestselling book Care of the Soul and twenty other books on deepening spirituality and cultivating soul in every aspect of life.
“Judith Johnson has written a heartfelt appeal for us to free ourselves from the death taboo that continues to haunt our culture. She also provides many helpful practices to assist us in developing a healthy relationship with death and dying – our own and others. This book springs out of a strong spiritual commitment to the author’s dying mother. It makes a valuable contribution to the emerging literature on holistic approaches to the profound and inescapable realm of death.”
-Ralph White, Co-Founder of the Open Center and Director of The Art of Dying Conferences
“As a guide to those seeking to consciously grow, serve and thrive as elders, I find Making Peace with Death and Dying a comprehensive, powerful and vitally important resource. Judith Johnson’s book is unique in its exploration of virtually every facet of death and dying in the contemporary world. It paints a vivid picture of how the strong cultural denial of dying and death disempowers and disables us from preparing in so many important ways for one of life’s most natural, and important, experiences. And then it contrasts this with a rapidly emerging (yet grounded in many of the world’s spiritual traditions) understanding of how to meet death with compassion, acceptance, trust and even curiosity.
A significant section of this book is devoted to reflections, exercises and poignant stories which help you explore your relationship to your mortality. These are in support of the book’s invitation to befriend life’s final passage and the smaller endings throughout life as opportunities for growth, compassion, and true embracing of each precious experience of transitory mortal life.”
-Ron Pevny, Director of the Center for Conscious Eldering and author of Conscious Living, Conscious Aging
“In this deeply felt book, Judith Johnson shares the lessons she has learned on dying and living following the death of her beloved mother. Her journey of discovery encompasses not only practical aspects of caring for loved ones at the end of life, but also the cultural, historical, and most importantly spiritual aspects of our relationship with death and dying. This book is an invitation to radically transform how we live by examining our understanding of death, a project which is crucial for our society.”
-Leslie J Blackhall MD MTS, Section Head, Palliative Care – Tussi and John Kluge Chair for Palliative Medicine University of Virginia School of Medicine
“Making Peace With Death and Dying is everything you ever wanted to know about dying and the death culture. Yes, that is an exaggeration BUT this book is comprehensive, honest, woven with personal stories and very well done. Don’t let the title scare you. It is very much about living. ”
-Barbara Karnes, RN, Author of The Final Act of Living
