Dale Borglum, executive director, Living/Dying Project
"Honest, compassionate, and filled with practical wisdom. Her clear and mindful view of living/dying shines through each page."

Book Description
When Blanche Stone was diagnosed with bone cancer, her daughter interrupted an unusual life--in a Buddhist monastery--to return home and become a full-time caregiver. With practical wisdom, humor, and an eye for telling detail, Susan relates their experiences sharing a house, dealing with finances, participating in family and holiday rituals, finding ways to ease Blanche's discomfort as her health declined, gratefully accepting the support of the local hospice, and coming to a greater appreciation of each other as individuals. Readers of any faith (or none) can benefit from these accounts of living moment by moment, responding without preconception to each evolving situation, embracing one's own needs along with the needs of a person facing death. Susan shows how such living happens: within a sacred place where there is room to honor and be awed by what is at hand, however difficult, and where one gains the freedom to enjoy it all. At the Eleventh Hour presents a model for how children can offer parents the gift of a "good death." In its natural weaving of spiritual truths into the daily fabric of life, it is an eloquent expression of how being present to dying expands the capacity for living. And, like a wise and supportive friend, it can lift spirits and be a reminder that, hard as it is, it's okay--and sometimes even fun. (In this way, it is similar to Tuesday's with Morrie which has lifted the spirits of millions).

About the Author
Susan Stone taught Asian history and culture at the University of Missouri--St. Louis, the University of Maryland, and American University in Washington D.C. before leaving her profession to focus on her life's work--integrating spiritual insights into everyday life. She received her initial training in Zen Buddhism in the Washington, D.C. area, then, in preparation for becoming a Buddhist monk, lived for two years at Shasta Abbey Buddhist Monastery in northern California. While caring for her mother in St. Louis, Susan served as co-leader of the St. Louis Insight Meditation group; founded a meditation group at a maximum-security prison in Potosi, Missouri; and volunteered her services as a Reiki (energy healing) master to AIDS patients.

Excerpted from At the Eleventh Hour: Caring for My Dying Mother by Susan Carol Stone. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Introduction: "Joy sprang from...the knowledge that, despite my bumbling, I was trying to live, based on moral principles, as the moments instructed. They were teachers, these moments. Like manna in the desert bestowed upon the wandering Hebrews in Biblical times, they sustained me, providing exactly what I needed, though not necessarily what I wanted, to exist perfectly. In their particularity--in the hum of the refrigerator, in the grassy view from the bay window partly blocked by the ivy-covered trunk of a massive mulberry tree, in Mom's feeble "Honey?" from the other room, in a fugitive fear that often ran just beyond by reach, and in the almost tactile yearning for what was absent--in all these things, in each moment, was instruction....Mom and I did have fun, right in the midst of it. The finality of the circumstances gave a special savor to what we did. We each tried to allow that savor to be expressed lightly and in laughter, when we found the chance. We became friends across our differences, slowly saying what needed to be said, sharing...our reactions to the traumas of those months."

FROM THE PUBLISHER