Going the Distance: One Man's Journey to the End of His Life.

We often treat books about death and dying as being of interest only to a narrow audience - which, given the universality of the experience, seems testimony to our capacity for denial.

But as the baby boomers turn fifty, more of us may find our thoughts turning to the final stages of life. George Sheehan's Going the Distance would be a good book to pack for the journey.

As a young man, George Sheehan - who died in 1993 at age seventy-five - had been one of the nation's leading collegiate distance runners. He later became a highly regarded cardiologist, a husband, and the father of twelve children.

In the early 1960s, when a hand injury forced him to stop playing tennis, Sheehan took up running again. What began as an alternative form of exercise soon became a passion. Sheehan helped show that middle-aged athletes could still be competitive - something we take for granted in the era of Cal Ripken and Carl Lewis, but in the midsixties it was a radical idea. In 1969, Sheehan ran the fastest mile ever run by a fifty-year-old.

"Doc" Sheehan found in the ascetic life of the long-distance runner a new way to connect with his own spiritual side. As he gained new insights into his running and his life, he began to share them - first through a column in his local newspaper, then in the magazine Runner's World, and in several popular books. As the running boom of the 1970s took off, authors like Jim Fixx taught millions of Americans how to run. George Sheehan helped them understand why they ran. Eventually Sheehan gave up his medical practice, and became a full-time writer and lecturer.

But in 1987 Sheehan's life abruptly changed once again, when he learned he had prostate cancer. A man who had been notably successful at holding off the physical effects of aging (he ran his fastest marathon, 3:01, at sixty-one) suddenly had to confront his own mortality. He was determined to make dying a learning experience, and to share that experience through his writing. The result is Going the Distance.

Like a marathon runner who knows he has neither time nor words to waste, Sheehan writes in simple, stripped-down prose "about what dying means to a person undergoing it." The book is in part a straightforward account of what it's like to have prostate cancer, and how he dealt with it. Told by a physician that "more men die with prostate cancer than of it," he took the remark not as a comfort but as a challenge - in the end he might not be able to defeat the cancer, but he was determined not to die in the meantime from any preventable ills.

He kept on running, but eventually found his strength ebbing - first from the cancer, and then, ironically, from the hormone therapy that slowed the growth of his tumor by depriving it of testosterone. "Within a season of running, I had become old. I lost what had fueled my life the past twenty-five years."

But just as he had done when facing middle age, Sheehan found in aging new possibilities for growth. "To many people," he tells us, "growing old seems like the endgame in chess: life winding down in a series of small moves with lesser pieces. As I age I have discovered this is not true....The aging game is chess at its best. The opening gambit may have been made long ago. The responses long since set in motion. Some pieces have indeed been lost. But the board is still filled with opportunity."

Like others before him, Sheehan saw parallels between aging and childhood. Old age, he tells us, should be a time of exploration. Adults are too preoccupied with the known world, "the having and the getting, the deeds and wealth of their generation. Children and old men venture beyond the known, to the terra incognita that surrounds our lives."

Sheehan saw both children and the elderly as preparing for their next lives - children for adulthood, and the elderly for eternity. As his illness progressed he began to wrestle with his religious beliefs. He found himself agreeing with William James, who admitted to having "no living commerce with God," but found the case for his existence compelling.

"Eventually every Christian has to ask himself or herself, 'What do you think of Christ?'....My feeling is that there is a Christ for everyone...."

Just as the approach of death brought Sheehan's relationship with God into focus, it also brought him back to his family after a period of separation. Sheehan seems always to have found it easier to deal with his own interior life than with those around him; his daughter Ann once said that his idea of being sociable was to have other people in the room while he was reading. But in his last years, he drew closer to his wife and children. He nevertheless seems to have found it difficult to write about his family; how his relationship with them changed and grew is the one area in which the reader comes away feeling that the author is holding back.

Yet Going the Distance still manages to convey something of the family's strength and closeness. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from comments Sheehan's children made at his funeral; and the book ends with an epilogue by his eldest son, George. Each helps reveal the human side of a man who sometimes writes as if he thought he could beat death by intellectualizing it.

In one of these eulogies, Sheehan's son Tim recounted a story from his father's years at Manhattan College. Nearing the end of a cross-country championship race, with six of his teammates trailing, George slowed down until, one by one, they caught up to him. The seven runners crossed the finish line together, arm in arm. At the end of his life, his son suggested, Sheehan had once again slowed down, looked back, gathered his family, and brought them together across the finish line.

Hugh O'Neill is president of Appleseed, a consulting firm located in New York City.