One Life, Many Deaths

As the path of his life unfolds, from a farm in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the pinnacles of academic medicine, a surgeon's childhood panic about death is gradually transformed into a mature peace with mortality. Not only his encounters with patients - from a gypsy patriarch to a homeless pauper - but also near-death experiences, premonitions, and other psychic phenomena, contributed to a growing sense of wonder, mystery, sometimes beauty, and above all serenity in the face of an inescapable human experience, death. The latter chapters, written after the author developed Parkinson's disease, describe how this physician, scientist, administrator, and increasingly spiritual seeker plans to live a full and happy life, and to have a "good death" when the time comes.