Only Love Breaks Open the Tombs

As an Assumptionist priest and chaplain working in the Hautepierre Hospital in Strasbourg, Denis Ledogar has spent much of his life comforting, consoling and learning from those in the last stages of life and from their families. In Only Love Breaks Open the Tombs, he brings together the testimonies of patients he has encountered who candidly share their thoughts on life, loss and family as they contend with failing health and the spectre of mortality. The goal of this book is to address ‘the delicate subject of the accompaniment of the human being at the end of life’ and is centered on ‘seven stages’ which the author has witnessed in those approaching death. This moving account of one man’s experience offering pastoral care to the terminally ill not only demonstrates how a patient’s final days can be lived with dignity and meaning but how, in ministering to those who are ill, we demonstrate that it is only love that ‘breaks open the tombs’.