Dr. Karen Wyatt - 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying: How to Nurture What Really Matters

This edition first published in the UK and USA in 2020 by

Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

Unit 11, Shepperton House

89-93 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

Design and typography copyright Watkins Media Limited 2020

Text copyright Karen Wyatt 2020

Karen Wyatt has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

English worldwide edition arranged through Montse Cortazar Literary Agency (www.montsecortazar.com). All rights reserved.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

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Designed and typeset by Lapiz

Printed and bound in UK by TJ International Ltd

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-786783-11-0

www.watkinspublishing.com

Previously Published Titles:

A Matter of Life and Death: Stories to Heal Loss and Grief The Tao of Death: The Secret to a Rich and Meaningful Life (an adaptation of Lao-tzus Tao Te Ching)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dr Karen Wyatt is a family physician who spent much of her twenty-five-year career as a hospice medical director caring for dying patients in their homes. Dr Wyatt has lectured and written extensively on end-of-life issues with an emphasis on the spiritual aspect of illness and dying.

Dr Wyatt is the host of the popular podcast End-of-Life University (eoluniversity.com). She lives in Colorado with her husband, Dr Larry George, and enjoys hiking and cycling in the beautiful Rocky Mountains.

You can contact Dr Wyatt for interviews or public speaking at:

Visit her website: www.karenwyattmd.com

For my mother who taught me to see the beauty of the garden; And for my father who taught me to reach for the stars.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heartfelt thanks go out to the many people who played a role in the completion of the original edition of this book and this new revision, either by offering their direct assistance and expertise or through their silent prayers for me as I laboured over this task of love.

To Jo Lal and the staff at Watkins Publishing, thank you for giving me the opportunity to revise and re-launch this book into the world at a time when this wisdom is desperately needed. Your support and advice have been extremely helpful to me during this process.

Many friends and family members have been instrumental in providing me with encouragement along this path. To Deena Metzger, writing coach and spiritual guide: thank you for sending me off on my own journey of Living the Lessons and instilling in me the deep faith I needed in order to complete the task. I am forever grateful to my beautiful children Aaron and Gia for offering me emotional support, thoughtful feedback, creative inspiration and business advice over the years as I have pursued this venture. It is my great fortune to be your mother, watching as you make the world a better place every day. There are no sufficient words to express my gratitude to my husband, Larry, who willingly set out with me on this journey into the unknown. Thank you for building a beautiful sunroom as my writing studio, for supporting us financially through my career change, for the hours and hours you have spent patiently listening to my ideas and stories, for never losing faith in me, for keeping your sanity when I have been pushed to the edge of mine, for being my untiring advocate, and for selling my books, one at a time. My love for you has no beginning and no end as we travel together on this life path.

Finally, my gratitude extends beyond this life to those who have already departed our presence. For persistent optimism and an unshakable belief in me, I thank my mother, Margaret Wyatt. Her powerful prayers while she was still with us sustained all that is good in the world and her love and support continue to surround me after her death. I am thankful for my father whose life inspired me to work with dedication and persistence and whose death led me to become a hospice physician. This book would not exist without the hospice patients and their families who generously shared their stories with me and allowed me to participate in the final moments of their lives. I am forever grateful to them for teaching me these spiritual lessons that have shaped my life and healed my own grief.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The irony of mans condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker writes about the agony of mankind, who must cope with the terrifying knowledge of mortality and find a way to survive despite that intrinsic fear. Sadly much of our modern society has chosen to shrink from being fully alive rather than face this incredible terror we have around our own mortality. Ultimately this failure to live fully leads to pathological behaviours, emotions and experiences.

My own research and explorations for the movie and book Death Makes Life Possible have been inspired by these questions: how do we help people become more comfortable with the idea of death? How can we develop capacities that will make us hardier and more curious in the face of our own mortality? And ultimately, how does death imbue our life with greater purpose and meaning?

These are the very questions upon which the survival of our species depends at this crucial time in history. These questions are arising and demanding a change in our relationship with death as we reach a crisis point in our healthcare system, which treats death as a scientific, moral and financial tragedy and leaves those at the end of life in trouble. And these are the questions that the book you are holding in your hands has been written to address.

Hospice physician, Karen Wyatt, is helping to shift this perspective with remarkable sensitivity, care and compassion with her insightful book, 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying. Through this rich series of stories, this book offers spiritual lessons that will touch the hearts and minds of Wyatts readers. And who better to learn such lessons from than this gifted writer, physician, healer and wise woman? Based on her years of dedicated work in hospices with dying patients, Wyatt skillfully shines much-needed light on the transformative nature of death and dying.

In this powerful book, organized into lessons that have been revealed through years on the front line of living and dying, Wyatt shares her own story. We learn that she found her way to hospice work after the tragic death of her father by suicide. Still fairly young in medical practice at that time, she was overwhelmed with grief and guilt because of his death. Wyatt began to volunteer for hospice when she was unable to recover from her sadness and loss. She intuitively knew that by exposing herself to death and dying, she could find the way through and out of her own suffering. What she learned from her hospice patients, and what we learn from the poignant narratives that Wyatt shares in this book, is that healing potentials lie in reverence, gratitude and appreciation for life in the face of death.