This is a hard one to review because I have such mixed feelings about it.

I came into this book expecting it to be about the verbal communication of people who are dying; as a hospice volunteer, I've had a number of fascinating experiences with people in transition, and I was curious to learn more about why we say and act as we do when we are transitioning. While I found some of the scientific parts a little dry, I was fascinated by the anecdotes people shared and some of the patterns that emerged, by the neurological theories, and by the potential for further research.

Where my opinion began to decline is when the book shifted to talking about psychics, telepathy, and ESP. Let me be clear that I'm open to the idea that there are things in existence that we cannot yet prove, so talking about telepathy isn't an instant deal-breaker for me. But when the first half of the book was about exploring shared experiences and theorizing about the brain, it was jarring--and disappointing--to suddenly shift to people sharing anecdotes about how after a death, they imagined a conversation with their dead loved one and believed they heard responses, or how before a loved one died they asked for a sign of life after death and then experienced something they found personally significant. I'm open to the idea that these experiences genuinely come from some kind of post-death communication--just as I'm willing to explore the idea that it's all a comforting illusion manufactured by a mind coping with grief--but it's not a topic that fits well with a book that advertises itself as being about pre-death communication.

So--it's nearly a four-star book on the strength of the first half, which I found incredibly fascinating and have been talking about with friends and family members. But unless you're here for psychic phenomena, you can tap out around chapter 7 without missing much. ( )

Six-word review: Objectively comforting despite promoting irrational beliefs.

Extended review:

I've told my sons that no matter what I die of, I don't want my obituary to use the word "battle."

As for exit lines, I think it would be most fitting if mine were simply "Now what?" That, of course, would reflect my prior experience as much as the one I was about to have. I don't happen to believe that there is anything coming next, but if it turns out that there is, I can understand the desire to report back.

Personally, I envision death as nothing more than a decomposition into our elemental components and a passing of breath into the air. It's our fear that gives it larger meaning.

The premise of this book is that something is to be learned from the last words of ordinary people as they approach their moment of death. The author has collected a quantity of final utterances heard at the bedsides of the dying by relatives, friends, and caregivers. She groups them according to certain commonalities and then analyzes the linguistic patterns and themes she identifies in them. Her idea is that people's attempts to express in words the experience of transition out of life point to a dimension beyond life that has a reality of its own--and that in their various modes of speech they are talking about the same dimension.

If that experience is in any way reflected in people's parting words, death is for many not a defeat, much less a terrifying confrontation with annihilation. Rather, it sounds more like a passage through an altered mental state that bystanders may conceive as a trip in the hallucinogenic sense--otherworldly, ecstatic, and inexpressible. Our vocabulary is not equal to it, and hence the often enigmatic speech of those on the verge of departure. It is not a battle fought and lost but an entry into another and seemingly more glorious form of existence.

It is this latter notion, that in death we are not being extinguished but actually going someplace else, and that last words offer a glimpse of that other realm, that moves this book out of the sphere of language study and into the sphere of belief. The author takes her time about transitioning from a quasi-scientific view to a mystical one, but by about the midpoint of the book she is sounding less analytic and more credulous, even citing psychics and mediums as authorities. For example, she quotes (page 119) a psychic by the name of Saavedra: "'When I do remote viewings or psychic readings, I am trying to get all the information embedded in the fabric of the universe. There is so much that we do not perceive with our senses, but does that mean it does not exist?'" Smartt's unquestioning acceptance of this view becomes a premise for explorations that lie still further from any objectively verifiable observations.

The author goes on to affirm the conclusions of a psychic medium named Stillman (pp. 128-129): "He believes, as I do, that the realm of the unseen is a world of symbols and metaphors--just as we often see in the language of the dying." By this point we're straying well away from anything that is evidence-based, so it is hardly surprising that we move on to messages sent from the dead to the living by various mystical and synchronistic means, such as mysterious doorbell ringings and anomalous light blinkings.

Assertions without evidence may be of interest as idea-starters, but to me they haven't much value as a source of knowledge. In my opinion, "speculative" is about the kindest term that can be applied to the parts of the text that go beyond straightforward factual recording of the last words of the dying and their linguistic characteristics. Examination of their subjective import is an act of imagination, not science.

And even if there were a logical basis for the author's interpretations of the samples she has collected, it's worth noting that they come from only one category of mortal departures. There is nothing here about people who don't get to die in a warm, quiet room with loved ones close at hand; nothing about people who die suddenly, disastrously, by accident or violence or natural catastrophe or slow torture, or by their own act. Are they going to the same place or a different one? Do their parting words, if any, offer glimpses of the same transformative experience or something a bit less appealing? The book does not consider such questions. It is at least arguable that the generalities noted among deaths that occur between clean white sheets do not extend to the nasty, ugly deaths that befall some of us.

So, rather early on, I concluded that I was reading something more fanciful and mystifying than rigorously fact-bound and analytic. If nothing else, the author's stunningly inept assertions about grammar (she defines prepositions as "those small words that represent where we are in space" [page 87]) call into question the reliability of her attention to accuracy.

Nevertheless, I read on out of curiosity, although with mounting skepticism. The notes in my reading journal grow more and more scornful as we progress; e.g., at page 143, "Now we're really into woo-woo territory."

And yet I must confess that my predominant impression at the end was this: Despite the heavy load of BS, Words at the Threshold is oddly comforting in the simple fact that (if faithfully recorded) the utterances of those on the brink of death seem to convey, by and large, a not unpleasant experience. It's not a battle lost but a possibly graceful (and gracious) transition. That's an appealing shore to land on, even if we had to wade through some goop to get there. ( )