Ahead of All Parting

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

At the peak of his career, Barry Michels was a psychotherapist treating Hollywood’s elite—studio heads, actors, writers, directors. He was so sought after, so essential to the creative output of his patients, he became the subject of a 2011 New Yorker profile that made much of his unique therapeutic approach. Along with his mentor, Phil Stutz, Barry wrote about their transformative method in The Tools, a buzzy New York Times bestseller (“The motivation book that everyone in Hollywood is obsessed with.”—Vanity Fair). Barry was a driven, type A personality who loved his family and found his work tremendously rewarding—yet when he wasn’t working, he was tormented by dark, suicidal thoughts that had stalked him since childhood. His response was to push harder, throw himself further into his practice, and bury the demons.

Then a neurologist diagnosed him with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disease that would inexorably erode his physical and intellectual abilities and result in his death. At first plunged into an abyss of despair, Barry was soon compelled, as if from a force outside himself, to tell people of his diagnosis—patients, friends, his mentor Stutz. In this process of activating his community for the first time on his own behalf, Barry was transformed. He found relief, inspiration, even joy. His creativity was unleashed, his capacity to love unfettered. He became a connoisseur of the sublime. And most surprising, this lifelong atheist embraced the divine. Ahead of All Parting is the story of Barry’s spiritual, emotional, and creative transformation, offering dispatches from the edge of the abyss that those of us in the middle of life’s journey would do well to heed.