Otherwise Fine: Moving Outside the Frame to Conquer the Fears of Dying

OTHERWISE FINE treats the "worm at the core," as the fear of death in each of us has been called, particularly its myriad forms heightened in our prime middle years of good health. These fears can be more acute in Late-or Never-Bloomers--those who suffer the "Blew-It" anxiety of unrealized potentials, low self-esteem and sense of purpose, or inauthentic lives--as well as in the religiously uncertain.

Barry writes, "Unabashedly, I begin with my own malaise. How many share and suffer 'Blew-It' Death Anxiety? It matters zero if others would agree with such self-asssessment. It matters only how we feel about ourselves in a clutch, looking down the road." As first and primary focus, she addresses the psychological fears of an inauthentic life and extinction without significance, then the fears involving the physcial process itself (pain, dependency and loss of control), and finally the fears of separation, nothingness, judgment and the unknown after the bodily death. The most relief for her personal anxiety, which is the least addressed in popular print, comprises the core first section of the book and is the life-transforming possibility of this book's death education.

Substantially though, Barry offers further anxiety relief and peace in four guideposts to weathering the dying stage itself and in a look beyond it. The latter includes the pros and cons of an afterlife belief and excludes all popular bestseller and television personality names in psychic phenomena in favor of material which is either fact or which has undergone rigorous scrutiny but is rarely cited and known by the general public.

OTHERWISE FINE: Moving Outside the Frame to Conquer the Fears of Dying is a journey into research material and insights all too often buried in specialist libraries; written in the first person, offering much personal humor, entertaining anecdotes and clear directives for transcending death anxiety.