Seize the Day by Marie de Hennezel offers a lesson in life

IT isn't every day that you curl up and read a good book about dying. This isn't, however, a solve-a-murder mystery.

Seize The Day

IT isn't every day that you curl up and read a good book about dying. This isn't, however, a solve-a-murder mystery.

In fact, there is no mystery at all. Marie de Hennezel is a psychologist who works in a hospital in France for the terminally ill.

This is her story in a diary format, detailing the shocking, tragic and truly uplifting stories of the patients who enter the palliative-care unit.

All of them will die, but how each person endures such a harsh reality is the surprisingly captivating reason this book keeps you hooked.

Sometimes it takes the act of dying to reveal our true identity, de Hennezel claims.

Paul, a young man with AIDS, can't bear talking to his parents about his death, so he lies in his bed pretending to sleep as they keep a bedside vigil.

Another patient, Daniele, is so debilitated she can communicate only by blinking her eyes.

The pressure and emotion the author and her colleagues absorb each day at work are also detailed, with staffroom tears and laughter.

Another patient writes to her sister apologising for their fall-out decades before. "I'm dying, but please don't come and visit,'' she writes.

Days later the sister arrives at the hospital. And that is the point of Seize The Day: there is a lesson here for all of us.

The author observes: ``There is not so much a fear of dying, but meeting oneself face-to-face and seeing how one has lived one's life.''

It appears she is urging people to stop waiting until their final days to re-connect with family, paint a tree or hug their mum.

VERDICT: Both tragic and uplifting