Charles Garfield
Shanti Project founder and author
ARTICLES
AUDIO
BOOKS
After four decades of training volunteers to offer comfort at the bedsides of the dying, psychologist and Shanti founder Charles Garfield has created an essential guide for friends, family, and healthcare professionals who want to ease someone's final days but don't know how to begin.
Dr. Garfield presents practical advice about finding connection, honesty, and peace while being of the greatest service to those at the end of life. By focusing on the reciprocal and healing relationship between the living and the dying, which continues until the last breath, he offers a path toward clarity and wholeness, and even growth. Life's Last Gift is an emotional lifeline for anyone who feels lost and filled with grief during this final stage of life.
Special praise for Sometimes Life's Last Gift
“In this finely written and immensely useful book, Charles Garfield offers all of us the concrete guidance we’ll need to skillfully and compassionately support those we love at the end of their lives. Dr. Garfield knows the terrain intimately and his book will help family members and friends of the dying negotiate this difficult and confusing time with grace and kindness.
―David Sheff, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Boy and Clean
“Dr. Garfield has written a highly practical and useful book―packed with moving stories, deep wisdom, and inspiring insights. This accessible volume is a genuine gift that demonstrates how we can all be effective, supportive caretakers for the dying.”
―Roger Walsh, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry,
University of California Medical School and author of Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices
Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb: Love and Caregiving in a Time of AIDS includes accounts from men and women who demystify the caregiving process as they talk candidly about the risks and rewards of supporting someone with a chronic or life threatening illness.
“An extremely valuable source of information for all of us. If you are alive, you are a caregiver. Read on; laugh, cry, grow, and learn how to deal with life’s afflictions. Your heart will be touched and your mind opened. When you read the stories contained in this book, you will become passionate about life, not numb.”
—Bernie Siegel, M.D., author of Love,
Medicine, and Miracles
Special praise for Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb
“Danny, Eric, Micaela, Bharat—I wanted to meet each of these exemplary caregivers and say, ‘thank you’ for demonstrating that we have an astonishing capacity for love. Here are twenty people who, in the face of life’s challenges, show us what to do, what to say, and how to be a compassionate presence when there is little that can be said or done. Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb is one of the most practical, well-written and moving books I’ve ever read.”
—Paula Van Ness, president, the National AIDS Fund, Washington, D.C.
© Charles Garfield, PhD 2020
