The Final Crossing

"The River Styx isn't far ahead. When it's time for the final crossing, doc, I want you there at the helm." Hearing these words from Steven Foster, hospice physician Scott Eberle unhesitatingly responded, "I give you my word, Steven. If it's within my powers, I'll be there." In a matter of weeks, Steven would be dead, having succumbed to a genetic lung disease at the young age of 64. THE FINAL CROSSING is the story of the journey these two people made together across the river that separates the living from the dead.Steven and his wife, Meredith, had spent nearly thirty years exploring, creating, and enacting wilderness rites of passage - a form of symbolic death. Scott had spent nearly twenty years learning to help others through the rite of passage that is physical death, and more recently he had also begun working as a wilderness guide. As Scott writes in the book, "while symbolic dying and literal dying are obviously not the same, they are deeply connected". During Steven's final days, the lessons they taught each other -- about symbolic and physical death -- were profound. As an old medieval prayer says, "To be blessed in death, one must learn to live. To be blessed in life, one must learn to die".Visit www.thefinalcrossing.com."This book is itself a right of passage. Extraordinary insights shared by two remarkable people, one dying, the other the inner life and decisions of the physician and friend attending this fine fellow preparing to head into death. This is the best work of its sort I have come across. There are so many levels, so many books in this book that it might well become a teaching text in many classrooms". Stephen Levine, author of "Who Dies?," "Healing into Life and Death" and "A Year to Live"