When the Hour Comes

What did the wisest people who ever lived actually do when it was their turn to die - or their turn to grieve? Every philosophy is finally tested in one room: the room where someone is dying. Socrates bathes before he drinks the hemlock, so no one will have to wash his corpse. Epicurus, dying in pain, writes to a friend that his joy is the greater. Seneca stages his death on Socrates' model. Zhuangzi grieves for his wife - and then drums on a tub, and explains himself. Montaigne spends thirty years changing his mind. Hume plays cards and jokes about Charon while his friends wait for him to break down. He never does. When the Hour Comes follows the teachers into that room - across Greece and Rome, China, India, Tibet, Japan, the medieval West, and the modern hospice - and asks of every tradition the same plain question: did the teaching hold? Inside you'll discover: Why Socrates refused to escape, what he argued on his last day, and why his final sentence is still argued about; Epicurus' "death is nothing to us," Lucretius' mirror argument, and the Stoics' open door - tested against real deathbeds; Zhuangzi's tub-drumming, the Buddha's last words, Kisa Gotami's mustard seed, and the book read aloud to the dying in Tibet; Samurai death-readiness and Japanese death poems - and where the samurai ideal turns cruel; Montaigne learning how to die, twice; Hume's scandalously cheerful end; Spinoza's free man; Kierkegaard at a graveside; Cicely Saunders and the founding of hospice, the truth about the five stages, the denial of death, and the death-positive movement; What modern grief research actually says - and a small morning practice for living with the end in view. Who this book is for: For anyone who has sat beside a deathbed and found our culture had no honest words for it. For the recently bereaved who are done with platitudes. And for readers of philosophy who want the scenes, not just the systems - the teaching and the test, together. Adrian Selborne writes about the history of ideas with a plain-spoken respect for both the traditions and the reader. The hour comes for everyone. This book keeps you company while you learn to meet it.