Review of Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift (New York: Avery [Penguin], 2021). Pp. 228.

Inspired in large part by the death of his own father, this little but important book by a practicing rabbi contains a lot of wisdom about death and dying.  Throughout its pages, Steve Leder offers many insights, a deep sense of compassion, and inescapable humor. As a rabbi, Leder has to guide many of the members of his temple at one time or another through the painful process of watching a loved one die. He often reminds them, when they face the death of a loved one, that they’ve overcome challenges before in their lives. He knows his scriptures well and admires the sagacity of the ancient Jewish writers. From the Song of Solomon, he reminds us that ‘Love is as strong as death.’ While we may worry about what is going through the minds of our loved ones as they lie dying, he points out that it is we, not they, who are afraid of dying. With tongue in cheek, he writes: “If you are afraid of dying, it is not your day. Anxiety is for the living” (18).

He practices a certain mindfulness in his profession and encourages us to stay focused as much as possible on the present. This said, however, he recognizes the importance of the past and the memories of someone on the verge of dying as much more beneficial than dwelling on the disease that is currently ravaging his or her body. In a passage that brought to mind my own time at the bedside of my dying father, he tells us that it is perfectly acceptable to tell the white lie (or truth, inasmuch as we can know what that is for the future) by saying to someone who will soon leave this world that those who remain will be just fine. My own father, who had succumbed to a massive stroke, may not have been able to hear me, but perhaps he could feel my presence or the touch of my hand on his in the hospital room. I felt comforted, then, as I read the subchapter heading “Don’t Underestimate the Power of Simply Being with Someone.”  Lever recommends that we be ourselves in our last moments with a dying person and counsels against pretending to be anyone else. He sees in the last goodbye simply an “ordinary” experience that we can approach naturally.   It’s easy to become enmeshed by the pain we feel upon the loss of a cherished fellow human being, but Leder assures us this “is the surest sign … that life matters” (41) and “[t]o deny grief its due is to deny love” (140). Or, as I might rephrase this in a similar vein, our pain is a clear indication of our humanity. Having “seen more than a thousand dead bodies” (108), the author is more convinced than ever of the soul’s immortality. On this earth, it is our memory that allows us to keep alive in our hearts and minds those who have died.

The author moves seamlessly back and forth from the spiritual to the practical. With respect to the desires of the living to see a dramatic turnaround when death comes, his experience has shown him there are none or, as he puts it, “most people die the way they live” (55). Leder’s training as a devout rabbi has engrained in him the belief that only God can take away a life. But whereas he sees love in extending a life, he sees cruelty in putting off death. When the time comes for our eulogies, we shouldn’t whitewash a deceased person’s life in our words of praise. A certain degree of truth makes these encomiums more believable and helps those hearing them feel more at ease recognizing the person they are honoring.

As he concludes his book, Leder leaves us with this lesson: “What have I learned from so much death? Simply this: to live and love fully while I am alive. …I want to live a beautiful life so that beauty is what remains within them [his children] when I am gone” (174-76). Leder’s frank honesty and willingness to share his own personal experiences and those whom he has known as a rabbi or a friend (and sometimes both) make this work as powerful as it is and profoundly inform its pages. It loses its inspirational qualities only when he occasionally drifts from these to repetition or analysis of the published writings of others. He shares a great deal of his deep feelings for his own father and an “ethical will” he has written for his children. He shows us not only how to live, but how to die or, as he might go on to put it for those surviving the loss of a loved one, how death can make life beautiful (223).