Book Description

What happens when we die?Is there simply nothing -- as some believe -- an eternal void? Or are we assured an afterlife? Few of us have not struggled with the question, for death is as certain and natural a process as life.Susan L. Schoenbeck has worked with patients at the edge of death for more than twenty-five years -- as an intensive-care nurse and a long-term care nurse, as a teacher of nurses, as a writer and lecturer. She has helped grieving families and individual patients who have entered that special realm between life and death and returned, who have encountered what we now call a Near-Death Experience (NDE), who have journeyed beyond life. She has witnessed the physical and spiritual sides of both life and death.From her own rich experiences, and by gathering those of others -- fellow nurses, doctors, patients, caregivers, emergency medical technicians, family members -- Schoenbeck has compiled this collection of more than sixty personal encounters in the special space between life and death -- or, as Schoenbeck views it, the final entrance.As Dr. Bruce Greyson says in the book's foreword, Final Entrance takes its meaning from the age-old metaphor, best known to us through Shakespeare's As You Like It, that 'all the world's a stage.' Schoenbeck dares us to think of dying not as an actor's exit at the play's finale, but as another entrance, perhaps for a final act not for public viewing.Many of the stories in this book are about near-death experiences. Some are about people experiencing spirit form outside their bodies. Others are about earthly visits of people who have recently died. Many people at the edge of death see and talk to family members longdeceased, and others find ways to say goodbye to loved ones far away. Some, journeying beyond life, choose not to return, resisting medical efforts to prolong life. In all these stories, there is the realization that death is not a final chapter but a transitional period, the entrance to a very special spiritual world. It is the spiritual side of the death process that Schoenbeck writes about in this book. As she says, Ask people who have had a close brush with death, 'Do you believe in life after death?' They reply, 'I don't just believe. I know.'Reading Schoenbeck's book will be a fascinating and telling experience for all readers, and it will hold a special meaning for her fellow nurses and caregivers everywhere. By working with people at the edge of death, and sharing those experiences with others, she helps all of us to understand and appreciate the very process of dying -- and by understanding, we lose fear of death and gain a new appreciation of life.