April’s Recommended Reading: The Beauty of What Remains

April's Recommended Reading is The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder. Rabbi Leder is the senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles and has decades of experience counseling the dying and their families. In this book, Rabbi Leder teaches what he's learned over his decades of ministering to the dying and the grieving, while also grappling with his personal grief over his father's Alzheimer's diagnosis and eventual death.

This description sounds like it might be grim. And to be fair, it is a very straightforward book about death. Death is a subject that we are often uncomfortable with and will go to lengths to avoid. Leder doesn't sugarcoat difficult circumstances and decisions (and there is a small amount of language that very sensitive readers may find offensive). However, this is a beautiful book about love and how precious our days and our memories are.  If you are not up for an entire book on the topic of dying, I recommend these two standout chapters:  7 - An Ocean of Grief and 9 - The Afterlife of Memory. He writes beautifully.

This book made me more conscious of my relationships with the people I love, the legacy I will leave behind when it's my turn to go, and the sheer preciousness of each day we get to live and soak each other up. I hope you'll give it a chance, even though it's an uncomfortable subject. It's a book you want to hug at the end. I loved it and feel like a better human for having read it.