Beautifully written, richly layered story unfolds like a mystery novel. Woven around a mother's journey Home in the embrace of her daughter's caregiving are backstories which progressively reveal undercurrents of loss, disrupted narratives, and shadow grief which have rippled from one generation to the next, shaping the psycho-spiritual journeys of grandmother, mother, and daughter. Mother and daughter heal themselves, each other, and a lineage haunted by the grandmother's traumatic death, and the mother flows into a state of grace that is enduringly transformative for both of them.

Practical guidance (e.g., re hospital-induced disorientation, keeping an elder out of a nursing home, shifting to a palliative care paradigm, partnering with hospice, building a caregiving family, letting go of one's life [for the dying and the caregiver], reconstructing an "orphaned" adult child's identity) unfolds within author's nonjudgmental lens which honors and learns from the consciousness of the dying rather than "correcting" it, and her capacity for providing an embracing, witnessing presence for her mother's becoming her truest self while letting go of her life. Within this web, the earthly flows seamlessly into the spiritual, the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the sacred is revealed in the seemingly mundane.­

Dying into Grace breaks ground by treating the caregiver and dying person as partners in a dance toward wholeness that nurtures the realization of dying's mutually transformative potential--which, if experienced, becomes unthinkable to have missed. By sharing her caregiving/dying/healing dance and distilling its form and movement into maps and guiding principles for family and professional caregivers as well as those who support and train them, the author introduces a relational paradigm for dying well while expanding what "dying well" can mean and coaching caregivers about how to dance.

The central narrative (Parts I-III) intertwines the story of Olwen and her journey Home with Artemis' caregiving story, and how they each were transformed by the process. Driven by their joint efforts to keep Olwen out of her nightmare--a nursing home--both partners struggle with the central question of caregiving/dying: "How do I let go of my life?" while encountering the sacred and discovering each other at the deepest levels. Her narrative having been ruptured by life-altering losses, the young and middle-aged Olwen had rebirthed herself three times, forging an independent path on which she did not engage her shadows. Her daughter, on the other hand, feels compelled (like the Sumerian Inanna) to journey to the "Underworld" to retrieve their story, embrace/release the pain/past, and enable recovery of their wholeness.

Olwen's death is the end of her life's journey, but not the end of the story. In Part IV, the healing process creates an opening in her former husband's relationship with his first family, Artemis experiences the perfection of her parents' difficult gifts for her own journey, and reconstitutes her inner world in the wake of their losses months apart. The last of her line, she recovers her roots in the Old Country, and discovers that her lineage has endowed her with what she needs to complete something for all of them and to fulfill her legacy.

Part V explicitly articulates the intention, mindset, and subtle movement of the dance through maps, tools, guiding principles, and coaching. March brings to bear acute observational skills and her gifts for inductively extracting principles from specific cases--gifts honed by 20 years conducting field studies and becoming an organizational storyteller for Harvard Business School, executive education programs, and healthcare innovators. Her commentary, insights, and earned wisdom emerge transparently, expanding the story's reach without pulling us out of the narrative.

Diverse professionals will recognize that March and her mother intuitively lived--and thus exemplify--core themes in several leading-edge discourses and movements (relational psychology, integrated care for the whole person, hospice and palliative care, dying well, disrupted narratives, seamless integration of all dimensions of dying, griefwork as reconstruction of identity), making Dying into Grace an excellent addition to diverse curricula. Rather than talking about these ideas, March unforgettably inscribes in our consciousness the impact of the realities informing them on shaping or transforming a human life, and helps to move the conversation forward.