Our Greatest Gift

Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) is Henri Nouwen's reflection on how to befriend one's own death and how to care for others who are dying. Written out of the deaths of friends and of his own encounter with death, and out of life at L'Arche Daybreak, it argues that dying well is a matter of discovering our common humanity and our identity as children of God, so that our death can become a gift to those who come after us, and that caring for the dying is a way of sharing in that gift.