Going gentle into that good night

THERE'S one thing you can say about death whatever else it is, it is not a minority interest, which is why Marie De Hennezel's book Intimate Death has been a best seller in her native France for nearly two months.

With a background in clinical psychology, 12 years - on and off in Jungian psychoanalysis and a body of experience gained while working with women in distress, 10 years ago Marie De Hennezel joined the first palliative care unit set up within a Paris hospital. Intimate Death tells how the unit cares for the dying or accompanies them to their death, as the author puts it - the philosophy of the team is to be with the terminally ill person whenever and in whatever way they are needed. In spiritual terms, this means accompanying them on the mental journey which brings them, eventually, to a calm acceptance of their approaching death.

For many, this is a rocky road indeed to travel. In the book, we meet young people succumbing to AIDS; an elderly ex-fighter pilot affronted by the idea of dying; a fading romeo who finds the courage to drop his facade; a mother anguished at the thought of leaving her 12 year old son. For all of them, Marie De Hennezel is an ear, listening not only to what they are saying but to what they are not saying. The man who wants to get his death over and done with fears he will be left to die alone. Reassured this will not be the case, he calms down and gives himself time to sort out his affairs. The woman who doesn't want to die is helped to look for the reason that is stopping her and finds it is an unresolved disagreement with her long lost sister. The sisters are reunited, peace is restored and the woman finds she can now face her death with equanimity.

Marie De Hennezel is 51, a mother and a grandmother. In 1985, on the invitation of Francois Mitterand, a longtime friend, she went to the US to join the celebrations marking the centenary of the donation by France, of the Statue of Liberty. She found herself sitting beside Mr Mitterand's interpreter, Christopher Thiery, whose father was French but whose mother was Irish. They married and Marie brought three children from a previous marriage to this, her second. Through Christopher, she got to know Ireland and finds that, compared with France, the rites and rituals of death here seem to have been better preserved. "I love walking in cemeteries in Ireland," she says. "They are usually close to the church which gives people a sense of community and there is plenty of grass which means nature is always present. In Ireland, there still seems to be an intuitive knowledge that the body is not only a physical thing but a spiritual one as well," she says.

"Nowadays, bodies are left in a cold, hospital room. There is silence and no one can talk or share their emotions." In her book, there are many references to warmth, to the lighting of candles and the burning of incense.

Marie De Hennezel is a humanist who takes whatever is on offer from all and every religion. Her god is the internal voice to which she listens and to which she urges the dying to listen. "I try to give people the confidence to listen to their own voices. When they ask questions, I tell them you have the answers'."

But in this rational, intellectualised age of ours, it is pertinent to ask what are the answers? Why do small children die? Why is a young man taken in his prime, a mother taken from her family?

She smiles and shrugs: "We have to learn to live with questions we cannot answer. That is the key to coping with our own helplessness. When we make room for that, it is, paradoxically, easier to live and deal with death."

She has discussed, with her husband, arrangements for her own death. She would like Bach to be played, for people tossing and hold hands and for the men in her family to carry her coffin.

We are sitting in Dublin's Shelbourne, Hotel. Marie De Hennezel's ash blond hair is soft round her face. She wears a bright red lipstick and her grey outfit with lace collar is comfortably smart. She is focussed, thinking carefully before speaking. With every aspect of death, she is calmly reassuring. Dying children are usually much less anxious about death than their waiting parents "Children understand quite well what is going on. They are lucid - their drawings tell us that - the pain for them comes from seeing their parents, weeping."

When those left behind are still distressed by an apparently difficult death or one they were unprepared for - her own father shot himself which caused her great anguish - she suggests they write down their feelings: "People can put into words all the things they'd weren't able to say at the time. That itself is calming.

There is no cure for death but there is a strategy for dealing with life - acceptance - which will help, she says, when the time for death approaches.

"At the moment of utter solitude, when the body breaks down on the edge of infinity, a separate time begins to run.

The moment is the moment of death and the words those of Francois Mitterand, who wrote the preface to this book six months before he faced his own death with an equanimity learned, in part, from Marie De Hennezel.