Ahead of All Parting: On Learning to Live with an Open Heart

A short, inspirational memoir about unleashing life in the face of death, by the coauthor of the influential New York Times bestseller The Tools.

At the peak of his career, Barry Michels was a psychotherapist who treated Hollywood’s creative and power elite. Along with his colleague Phil Stutz, he went on to write The Tools, a buzzy New York Times bestseller. Michels was driven, a type A personality who found his work tremendously rewarding. And then he was blindsided by a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disease that would, in a matter of years, erode his physical and intellectual abilities. The same illness that had taken his father’s life would take his own.

At first, he was plunged into an abyss of despair, finding respite only in his practice and on long, defiant hikes. And then Stutz gave him life-changing advice: He told Michels to walk the karmic path before him, to write in order to find meaning, and to fight like hell. He challenged him to transform pain into purpose and claim inner freedom.

In the weeks and months that followed, Michels reached out to friends and patients about his diagnosis. And in this process of making himself vulnerable, he activated community. In his persistence, he found inspiration, even joy. His heart opened, his relationships grew deeper, his creativity was unleashed. He connected with his Life Force. He began writing poetry—an unstoppable outpouring from his soul. His capacity to love was unfettered. Beauty—in nature, in a piece of music or art—could move him to tears. And most surprising of all, this lifelong atheist embraced the divine.

Ahead of All Parting is the inspiring story of Michels’s spiritual, emotional, and creative transformation. It offers lessons on living a more meaningful life, written with the exquisite clarity conferred as the end comes into focus.