The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation

by Kathleen Dowling Singh

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San Francisco/New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1998 332 pp $15.00 28 pp notes and references

Kathleen Dowling Singh presents excellent descriptions of many healings that are possible in the process of dying. While her transpersonal orientation is apparently inspired by Sufi (mystic Muslim) traditions, her writing is relevant universally. As she notes, "I am an ordinary person working with ordinary people dying ordinary deaths." ( p. 3).

Singh specifies that this book is for people who have a space of time towards the end of their life – or are close to someone in this situation – and who can contemplate what lies ahead. It is not for people who are already in the process of transition. At this stage, one’s business is simply to get on with what is happening, not to distance oneself from it through analyzing it.

I found Singh’s discussion on qualities of the Nearing Death Experience to be helpful handles on aspects of the deathing process. These include the qualities of relaxation, withdrawal, radiance, interiority, silence, the sacred, transcendence, knowing, intensity, merging, and experienced perfection.

Taking a more structured perspective, Singh considers stages of releasing of controls over psychophysical functions (Karnofsky scale – Appendix II) and relates them to stages in the process of dying which she finds conceptually helpful, including chaos, surrender and transcendence.

Singh’s discussion brings an atmosphere of peace, acceptance and healing to what is often in our society a time fraught with anxieties, fears and distress. An example of this attitude is evident in the following observation:

The AIDS community has called its disease ‘Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self’ and has referred to the pandemic as ‘enlightenment at gunpoint.’ This phrase applies equally to any one of us who is dying. (p. 15)

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