The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

Leder (More Beautiful than Before), senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, delivers insightful thoughts on death and the process of dying for the spiritual and secular alike. Though Leder has spent more than 30 years visiting the sick and dying and helping to arrange funerals with grieving family members, he writes that he was unprepared for his father’s long struggle with Alzheimer’s and eventual death. Leder shares intimate details of his father’s illness and reflects on how his role as a rabbi has influenced his own relationship to death, coming to realize his “shtick” of “wisecracks” and “exaggerated gestures” needed to give way to his “authentic self” during his father’s final days. Leder writes that he often has to dish out tough love, such as his advice to a man who believed his father’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer would bring them closer: “Making peace with death is really about making peace with life —accepting the things that cannot be changed so that we do not exhaust ourselves, fool ourselves, or consider ourselves failures.” Leder’s elegant and compassionate rumination is a worthy addition to the literature on death and dying. (Feb.)