reading about dying – 2 book reviews

Why dwell on death?

For a couple of years now I’ve been studyin’ about death. I’m getting older; my parents are getting older, and I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with it – that I remember, anyway. I do believe in reincarnation, and thinking about that makes the prospect of death easier, but that is a topic for another time. In this life I don’t like to be blind-sided with extreme emotion, so reading is my way of sneaking up on the issue of mortality. As with so many of life’s experiences, I want to take my time with it. Hold it up to the light from many angles. Try to find the good in it. I’m not brave enough (yet?) to volunteer in nursing homes or in palliative care, to look death in the face while I hold its hand, but while I work my way up I’m doing a lot of reading.

I like books written from Death’s POV (The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak was a recent re-read, and even better than I remembered), and I would put Mrs Death Misses Death, by Salena Godden in that category. In MDMD, Death is an overworked Black woman. She dictates her story to a young writer named Wolf (a desperately lonely guy who squanders money he doesn’t have on a magic desk). She tells him stories of deaths that have impacted her (some real, some out of Godden’s imagination – some narrative, some in prose-poem form). There are blank pages at the end of the book and Godden invites readers to include their own stories of important deaths. I found it an oddly comforting book despite its unflinching inclusion of recent, terrible deaths like those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. MDMD has been optioned for television by Idris Elba, and I’m very curious to see how they’ll adapt something so cerebral, nonlinear and unique for the screen.

In contrast, Dog Church, by Gail Gilmore, is pure, brutal emotion. I ugly-cried the whole way through. You have to be brave to own dogs, knowing you will outlive them. Knowing you will have to look into their trusting eyes as the euthanizing drugs take those beautiful souls away from you. And yet the lessons dogs provide us – years of complete joy and uncomplicated love, followed by a grief that is also uncomplicated – are opportunities, and Gilmore puts her entire soul at our disposal in Dog Church as she grapples with the impending death of her beloved Chispa. It’s a gift of extreme generosity, and so raw it’s difficult to read at times – and yet, in the way that fully expressed grief is cathartic, Dog Church burns clean. Amazingly, you will leave it ready to risk your heart again.

If you, like me, are taking a cognitive approach to this most physical and emotional of experiences, you may also want to check out

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

and Grief Cast (“funny people talking about death and grief”), a podcast with Cariad Lloyd

If you have other recommendations of books, films, podcasts, television programs or documentaries that have helped you become better acquainted with death, please list them in the comments!