A Matter of Death and Life: Love, Loss and What Matters in the End (Language Acts and Worldmaking)

Dieses Buch ist eine wunderschöne und bewegende Lektüre, die tiefe emotionale Resonanzen hervorruft, auch wenn es einige sehr schwierige Themen behandelt.

Ich habe dieses Buch für meine Schwester gekauft, weil sie gerne liest. Das Buch hat eine solide Aufmachung und die Bindung wirkt haltbar. Sie hat es an sich gerne und kann es in Ruhe anschauen.

“How much are we willing to bear to stay alive?” While Dr Yalom’s lifework consisted in helping and convincing his patients of life’s worth, of life being worth struggling for, he himself here comes to a point where he’s having a hard time taking on this lecture. He has to say goodbye to the love of his life, has to watch her suffering through their last months together and, finally, he has to manage to go on without her.Marilyn and Irvin D Yalom have written a very intimate and intense book about leaving this world and ending one’s life. Therefore, this book is full of emotions, but also of doubts, fears and thoughts, that came very precious to me. It deals with the fear of death, most of us have, and tries to give comfort by having a very close look at this matter – something we generally rather try to avoid as long as we can. “What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past”, Irv quotes the writer Milos Kundera. A very interesting approach, I find. Another thought I found truly comforting: “Where death is, I am not. Why fear something we can never perceive?” (p 68) After all, “[…] one’s state of nothingness after death is identical to the state of nothingness that one was in before birth” (p 69), and nobody mourns that state of darkness before our birth.Although it’s Marilyn who suffers a fatal illness including all the pain and the knowledge about its ending in death, it’s also her that brings the most comfort into this book. Being a very intelligent woman that achieved everything in life, she finds the strength to feel gratitude and in peace with her fate. She can appreciate to have lived a regret-free life and that “there is a time for every season… A time to be born and a time to die.” (p 49) She also wisely states that “one stays alive not only for oneself, but also for others” (p 14), and so she does for almost a year. But the end comes and leaves her beloved husband desperately struggling through a life without her. Having professionally assisted so many surviving dependents in his life only helps him modestly. Just as Mascha Kaléko appropriately formulated in her poem MEMENTO:“Just think: one’s own death one just has to die; But with the deaths of others one must live.”And still, despite all the heaviness and sadness in this lecture, again and again there’s a brightening thought, such as “I, and only I, have to take full responsibility for determining reality.” (p 182) In the end, life is cherished as “a miniscule crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” (122) A festival of lights – if we want to.