Words at the Threshold What We Say as We're Nearing Death [Paperback]

What Our Last Words Reveal About Life, Death, and the Afterlife

A persons end-of-life words often take on an eerie significance, giving tantalizing clues about the ultimate fate of the human soul. Until now, however, no author has systematically studied end-of-life communication by using examples from ordinary people. When her father became terminally ill with cancer, author Lisa Smartt began transcribing his conversations and noticed that his personality underwent inexplicable changes. Smartts father, once a skeptical man with a secular worldview, developed a deeply spiritual outlook in his final days  a change reflected in his language. Baffled and intrigued, Smartt began to investigate what other people have said while nearing death, collecting more than one hundred case studies through interviews and transcripts. In this groundbreaking and insightful book, Smartt shows how the language of the dying can point the way to a transcendent world beyond our own.Lisa Smartt, MA,is a linguist, educator, and poet. She founded the Final Words Project, an ongoing study devoted to collecting and interpreting the mysterious language at the end of lives. She lives in Athens, Georgia.Words at the Thresholdis a treasure trove of experience and insight around the last words spoken by the dying, as revealed through the mind of a linguist, proposing that birth and death are different facets of the same process, that both are essential in the cycle of life, and that our soul connections do not end with death. The words of the dying provide some of the most salient clues as to how we can best live our lives on earth.
—Eben Alexander, MD,neurosurgeon and author ofProof of HeavenandThe Map of Heaven

WithWords at the Threshold, Lisa Smartt has given the world of near death studies a fresh new path for research. Deeply moving and meticulously researched, this book offers a feast of fresh information alã=