Notes & Quotes: The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder

The following are my favorite quotes from Steve Leder's The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift:

1. This very simple insight, that most of us tend to face death the same way we faced life, is mind-blowing for a lot of people when they first hear it. It changes the context of death from something foreign and filled with wishful thinking to something familiar that both the living and the dying have lived and understood for many years.
2. Here is perhaps the toughest and yet most liberating truth about the fact that people die the way they live. If you have had a hopelessly toxic relationship with someone, even someone as close as a parent or a sibling--a relationship fraught with feelings of guilt, remorse, anger, and disappointment--you do not need to try to repair it before that person dies. You simply need to accept it.
3. In order to make sure you can die the way you lived, meaning in control of your own destiny and according to your own values, you must appoint someone who can speak for you if and when you can no longer speak for yourself. Choose uncompromising advocates who will never let you down. Most people say they want to die at home, but 80 percent of Americans die somewhere other than their homes. Saying you want to die at home is not the same as having a plan.
4. Meet with your minister, imam, rabbi, or whoever you want to conduct your funeral service. Talk to her or to him about who you want to eulogize you, what things you want to be certain are said and done, what you want to be sure is not said or done, who you want to carry your casket, what music you want played, and everything else you can think of to have peace and mind about the service.
5. Use the fact that you will almost surely not die from a sudden event but rather from a slow decline as an opportunity; use that time and those years of accrued wisdom to take control over your own death. Make it a final, beautiful example of your life.
6. When I am called into the ER or the ICU or the nursing home or the bedroom of a dying person by his or her family, in the midst of the sadness, the stress, and the chaos, I ask a single, simple question to cut through the emotional clutter: "Is what you are thinking of doing prior to prolong his life or prolong his death?" It is loving to prolong life, to give someone a chance to live and love and laugh again. But it is cruel to prolong death.
7. When death is unforeseen and tragic, it is excruciatingly painful for those who mourn. But for the dead, it is a death like all others--perfect sleep. The deepest peace.
8. Until little more than a century ago most people died at home. Their bodies were washed and prepared for burial by people who loved them. This business of being transported after death quickly away from the living and then chemically altered to seem somehow less dead has made it more difficult, not less, for mourners to embrace the reality of death.
9. Time, life, and we are finite. We really are only human. We can each do only so much, control only so much, and at some point we have to let go, trust, live. To be at peace with our helplessness is the most terrible and liberating of lessons.
10. What have I learned from so much death? Simply this: to live and love fully while I am alive.
11. We too, we mere humans, must also actively remember our loved ones, or they too will surely die not once, as all things must, but a second, more permanent death.
12. People do not really die when the heart stops beating. As long as their lives, their values, the melody to which they lived and danced continue to play in the memories of loved ones and through their effects on the world, they live on.
13. The happiest people are those who know they are living lives that have meaning beyond themselves. If you want to feel fulfilled--really, truly fulfilled--then live beyond your own life. Live as a good ancestor to those you will never know. We are at our best when we know for certain that we have transcended our own brief and beautiful time on earth. That is the essence of being fully human. That is the essence of what it means to lead a meaningful life.
14. The older I become and the more distanced from my father's life and death, the more I realize how incumbent it is upon us all to make the legacy we inherit more beautiful and more authentically our own, not only by living as our loved ones lived in their finest moments, but also by choosing what not to carry forth from their worst.