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By the end of World War II, attitudes toward dying had changed considerably from the sentiments expressed by Mary Ann Webber when she wrote from her Vermont farmhouse to remind her children that “the seeds of death are within us” and urge them to “be prepared to meet the event with Christian fortitude.” We saw that tuberculosis occasionally was idealized in the nineteenth century because it provided time for spiritual reflection; now a good death was widely believed to be quick and sudden. As a secular model of ars moriendi increasingly replaced the older, religious version, acceptance of God’s will had become synonymous with resignation and fatalism. Popular culture encouraged patients to pursue every available medical therapy in the fight for recovery and ignore the signs of encroaching disease insofar as possible. Many people confronting terminal disease followed that advice. Nevertheless, scientific optimism had not extinguished the spiritual component of death and dying. Even during the 1950s, at the height of popular confidence in medical prowess, most Americans belonged to religious congregations and believed in God and an afterlife. And many who eschewed religious institutions and beliefs looked to other forms of spirituality to try to understand the tragedies medicine could not avert. Because the United States had become a far more religiously pluralistic society during the postwar period than it had been a century earlier, patients and caregivers drew on extremely diverse faith traditions. By the late fifties and early sixties, those included many eastern religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, and Hare Krishna. Long before her daughter Amanda fell ill, Dorothy Dushkin had begun to study the writings of Krishnamurthi, a spiritual leader from India, and Hubert Benoit, a Frenchman who helped to introduce Buddhism to the West. As she struggled to come to terms with her daughter’s grim outlook, she read and reread the works of both writers, redoubling her efforts to incorporate their insights into her life. She even addressed a query to Benoit via his American pubc h a p t e r 8 The Sacred and the Spiritual The Sacred and the Spiritual 137 lisher, and when Benoit sent a reply “that was not at all perfunctory,” she was overjoyed , and they began a brief correspondence. She also tried to read Alan Watts, an American Buddhist writer, before concluding he was “too wordy.” Eleven months before Amanda died, Dorothy stressed the importance of remaining focused on the present. “So much of this grief is concerned with time,” she wrote in February 1961. “Waiting for developments, for diagnosis, for cure or defeat , endless speculation as to becoming—imagination feeds on time.” The only solution was “drastic & fundamental change—a life in the present so complete that past & future are unimportant.” The injunction to pay strict attention to painful emotions also proved useful. “The only peace of mind I get these days of watching Amanda’s desperate illness,” Dorothy wrote on December 12, 1961, “is by plunging into the confusion of my reactions.” And a month later she was able to find at least a modicum of serenity while awaiting Amanda’s death: “I feel no bitterness or need for inveighing against fate. This is only our human condition—common to all. I can only yield to this suffering without need to blame, resent or be defeated. It has come and that is—just as clouds come over the mountain.” John Gunther’s ex-wife Frances also adhered to a faith tradition that differed significantly from the Protestantism that had dominated the United States throughout the nineteenth century. John had resisted including “A Word from Frances” as a postscript to Death Be Not Proud and did so only at his publisher’s insistence. Although he acknowledged the section was “beautifully, movingly, exquisitely written,” he also pronounced it too personal. “I tell a story,” he remarked, “and she tells of a relationship and how you stand it when a relationship is broken by something external.” Frances described in lavish detail the myriad activities she and her son had enjoyed together and poured out her anguish. “All the things he loved tear at my heart because he is no longer here on earth to enjoy them.” Guilt also assailed her. “Missing him now, I am haunted by my own shortcomings, how often I failed him,” she confessed. “I think every parent must have a sense of failure, even of sin, merely in remaining alive after the death of...

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