Chapter 2 "Nearing Death Awareness" Summary and Analysis

Chapter 2 begins the first of three major divisions within the text—Part I - Nearing Death Awareness: Introduction and Background—as such it serves as the formal introduction to the text. The three chapters of Part I provide the building blocks to the remainder of the book, and they construct the text's themes. Unlike the previous chapter, Chapter 2 focuses on non-biographical development of the text's primary theme. The term 'Nearing Death Awareness' is coined and defined to mean the special awareness of dying that often accompanies the dying process among people who experience a slow process of dying. Unlike a 'near death experience' which is often vivid and short, Nearing Death Awareness is a gradually developed sense of impending death, often viewed as a form of confusion or hallucination by the...