Book Review: Into The Light

I have been educated, inspired and comforted by many books on death and dying that I have read over the past several months, and this is the most recent one that I have read, which I recommend to anyone who is searching for ways of understanding death or is in the grieving process. Whether you have a fear of death or you don't, please read this book because it is a fantastic source of understanding death.

This terrible fear of death has come to us as a result of our erroneous religious teachings, for the most part, in which we were taught concepts of everlasting hell fires and harsh judgments of an angry God. I have vivid memories of my earliest experiences of church attendance when I was just a young child in which the pastor preached every Sunday very aggressively on a theme that always seemed on center on frightening concepts of "harsh judgments and hell and brimstone" by a vindictive God figure.

Even though I left that church long long ago, those concepts stayed with me and have been hard to fully extinguish.

"Into the Light" by hospice physician, John Lerma, M.D., is in an outstanding book that will comfort you and profoundly touch your heart. In this book, Dr. Lerma features the experiences and stages of death and dying of 16 of his dying patients. There are stories of young children who bring honor to death and peace to their families. Older people, some who have lived their lives being close to God, and others who have lived their lives in quite another way, share their dramatic visions in their last days on this earth.

The visions of angelic beings, common to all of them, no matter their age or circumstance shows a loving God and insights into why bad things happen.

Dr. Lerma shares these stories objectively and seems to be as astounded as anyone of us could ever be. He has carefully listened to these patients describe to him their incredible visions of angels, Jesus, and loved ones previously passed over. He does this without leading the patients on, but simply being open to their experiences and being there to provide comfort to people who are in the stages of death and dying. He even describes physical manifestations of feathers that appear out of nowhere and then disappear again just as mysteriously as they came.

This is a book you will cherish, and one that will bring you much comfort in dealing with death and dying. I truly wish that I would have read this book before my daughter passed to the other side. My grief would not have been any less, but my comfort would have been profound.