Review After the Diagnosis…a Guide for Living
After the Diagnosis…: A Guide for Living by Reverend Thomas F. Lynch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A dear friend of mine, who has not only experienced the harsh reality of sustained illness that has left her on death’s door multiple times but has also enjoyed the personal and pastoral comfort of Fr. Thomas Lynch, sent me a copy of his book After the Diagnosis…a Guide for Living a few weeks ago. Without this personal recommendation, I likely would not have looked at it twice much less read it carefully, taking much of its advice into consideration. At first, it struck me as too narrowly religious (Catholic) in approach. Then the subject matter, as presented in its subtitle, The Transformative Power of Love During Sickness, Dying and Death, is, well, morbid, at least in part. I’ll admit that the desire to better understand and help my friend in her condition started me reading it. But it was to understand and help myself (now healthy but in my seventies) that I read it through and incorporated it into my daily meditations.
This is a practical manual prepared by a duo of authors who have spent face time at the bedsides of many ill and dying people where words without solid truth behind them wilt faster than cut flowers in the desert sun. Coming through with clarity is their intention to support and comfort those human angels, professional and familial, to whom it falls to care for the sick during the final vigil. Their advice to be applied in the most critical of life situations is delivered with exquisite care and reverence for both patient and caregiver. That Rev. Lynch and Barbara Mariconda succeed, as the numerous testimonials proclaim, puts their book in that growing and vital library , which includes the works of the likes of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Eben Alexander, which addresses the supremely important but largely avoided subject of our mortality.
One reservation for the non-Catholic : in the book’s Introduction, the authors, while acknowledging that the book “is written through the lens of the Catholic Christian faith,” claim that “the ideas, insights, and practices point to the universal core truths that make them applicable to all religious traditions.” I was disappointed that this thread of inclusive Universalism, which underlies the deepest religious/spiritual urge in all humans, was too frequently limited to explanations and practices of a single tradition. An opportunity missed.