Meetings at the Edge: Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying, the Healing and the Healed

For three years in the 80’s Stephen Levine and his wife Ondrea ran a free telephone helpline for people who were dealing with death, their own or another’s. Some of the callers interacted with the Levine’s on multiple occasions and over many hours. A few callers gave permission for their calls to be recorded and later used in this book. Each chapter covers an individual caller and is the word for word or very closely paraphrased conversations that took place. In these moving conversations, people reveal their deepest fears of death and their struggles with things like grief and anger. Levine uses meditation exercises and a Buddhist approach to help the callers to lean into their feeling and fears and pain. He often helps terminally ill callers to come to live with their pain and let it wash over them and eventually sit outside of the pain, as if watching separately and detached. Each caller has a different story and there are many situations covered, such as the death of a child, the death of a spouse, and even the death of the primary caregiver of someone with a terminal disease. In all of these interactions it becomes clear that Levine connects deeply with his clients and is dedicated to helping them to grow in their experience with death. It is often the case that callers will exude what Levine referee to as a block to their growth in the experience of their disease and dying. He skillfully helps his clients to see that there is another path they can take that is less rooted in confrontation. I enjoyed seeing how he spoke to these people who are suffering and often at the end of their rope. His acceptance of who they were as people, while offering them alternatives to their current thinking, was magical to watch as it unfolded through kind words, meditation exercises, and direct and insightful questions. The stories of these lives as told through these conversations are moving and cause one to think about what pain, death, and grief mean and how those things alter people and force them to grow and change even at the end of their lives. This book is a revelation for anyone who wants to watch grief counseling and death counseling in action.