Create Your Best Life--Kill The Grim Reaper: How to Live Fully Knowing One Day You Will Die

The author of this book assumes you don't like the idea of dying. He suspects, too, you have not really prepared for it, and were you to face dying today, you could not do so at peace and be able to say, "I have lived my best possible life." He also takes for granted you've retained fanciful, childhood notions about living, dying, and death, including nonsense about the grim reaper. Is he right?

This book relentlessly pursues life. In the Introduction, Robinson urges you to update your worldview to make sure it's coherent and in touch with reality.  He also challenges you to be true to yourself so you create your best possible life.

In Part One, CREATE YOUR BEST LIFE, he introduces 10 steps that will help you let go of childhood thinking and connect with real life. You can identify these steps by looking inside the book at the Contents pages. He caps this first major section by explaining perfect love and what it means to trust and practice it.

Part Two, KILL THE GRIM REAPER, also focuses on living robustly. The author distinguishes between the ongoing process of dying and death as a state of being (or non-being), and quickly rejects denial, morbidity and escapist fantasies as adequate ways to deal with them. He then elaborates on six creative approaches to dying and death that are honest and liberating. Along the way, he explains what kill the grim reaper means ... and how to do it. His penetrating point contends that until you get real about living, dying and death, you cannot be your best self or live your best life.

In the first of the book's two intimate postscripts, the author tells the poignant story of his wife's suddenly discovered illness in July of 2008, and of her dying that October. In the second, he tells what was going on in him the next year, when a nasty, life-threatening staph infection forces him to face his own possible dying.