It was after reading A Matter of Death and Life that I dreamt of Yalom. I was sitting with him, struggling to find a way to offer him comfort, and realizing the only path forward was to open up about my own aging process, my own struggles with loss and fear of disappearing into the past. We need one another to heal. Nothing drives home that lesson better than reading the works of Irvin Yalom, especially this late work from the final years of his life. Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

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20,919 ratings, 4.32 average rating, 941 reviews. A book aimed at enriching the therapeutic process for a new generation of patients and counselors, Yaloms Gift of Therapy is an entertaining, informative. Irv isn't perfect – he's human, and he's getting old himself, dealing with memory loss and neurological problems. He doesn't dress anything up, but tells the truth about struggling with his own depression and despair and helplessness faced with his dread of death as well as the reality of losing the only woman he has ever loved. I read portions of this book in tears, and it pairs well with Yalom's book about confronting death, and the terror of one's own demise, in a psychotherapeutic context, 'Staring into the Sun'. The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients by Irvin D. She insisted, perhaps out of concern for Irv, that they write one final book together, each contributing alternating chapters. The result is a book of searing honesty, an honest account of profound love as well as a profound and painful loss. Yalom will turn 90 in June of 2021. In 2019, at the age of 88, he discovered his beloved wife of 65 years, Marilyn Yalom, a celebrated historian and feminist author and professor, was dying of cancer.

Yalom the gift of therapy