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Cory Taylor was born in 1955, and she died of cancer in 2016. Sixty-one seems awfully young to die, especially from my vantage point of fifty-two, and Taylor certainly thought it was premature. She had books she still hoped to write, children she wanted to see established in their adult lives, �� plans. And yet, she considers her approaching death with grace and gratitude, refusing, much as Christopher Hitchens did in his death memoir, "Mortality," to snatch up at the last minute religious beliefs she had found implausible while in good health or indulge in complaints about “unfairness.�� She dreads the growing suffering and incapacity she knows is approaching, but her love for her husband and sons and her concern for their feelings outweighs her fear and keeps her from using the packet of poison she ordered during her investigation into suicide. Comparing her own death to that of a friend's son, who died at nineteen, Taylor says “the fact that I was dying now was sad, but not tragic. I had lived a full life.��

Much of this “memoir�� is about Taylor's parents, whose unhappy marriage left lasting marks on their children, and whose miserable deaths play strongly in her considerations of her own priorities, both in living and in dying. Taylor was close to her mother, and watching this beloved parent die horribly of dementia encouraged her to investigate assisted suicide and then less abrupt methods of dying with the greatest possible measure of dignity and comfort. About her mother's death Taylor writes,

"She was in a nursing home when she died, a place of such unremitting despair it was a test of my willpower just to walk through the front door. The last time I saw her, I stood helplessly by while she had her arse wiped clean by a young Japanese nurse. My mother was clinging on to a bathroom basin with all of her meagre strength, while the nurse applied a fresh nappy to her withered behind. The look in my mother's eyes as she turned and saw me watching reminded me of an animal in unspeakable torment. At that moment I wished for death to take her quickly, to stop the torture that had become her daily life. But still it went on, for a dozen more months, her body persisting while her mind had long since vacated the premises. I could not think of anything more cruel and unnecessary. I knew I had cancer by then, and a part of me was grateful. At least I would be spared a death like my mother's, I reasoned. That was something to celebrate."

With my own mom currently dying of lung cancer and dementia, this naturally caught my attention. Her view, that the cancer is preferable, matches my own suspicions as I've watched my mother's long decline into increasingly helpless silence from Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia, a form of FTD, and now her rapidly increasing weakness and pain with the cancer. The slow, dehumanizing darkness of dementia or the suffocating pain of the cancer. Of course, my “opinion�� on the matter is irrelevant, as well as ill-informed, but I figure that Taylor, at least, had solid insight in that matter and I'm going to take her judgment as a small measure of comfort.

Lest my comments make this sound unremittingly dark, I should say again that Taylor really is not morbid, and her love for her husband, children, and other family, and her gratitude for the life she has lived shine through her book. Her admiration for her mother is a constant, and one of my favorite images in the book, which is filled with memorable images, is from an evening in Taylor's childhood, when she and her mother were taking a trip around the main island of Fiji, visiting beaches. She says,

”My mother took me out for a reef walk, to the very edge, where the reef drops away and the water changes from turquoise green to blue-black. The surf out there was pounding, the wind was blustery, and I wanted us to turn around and go home. But my mother stood firm, a wild grin on her face, her hair whipping around her head, her arms outstretched.
“Just look where we are!�� she shouted, spinning around to take in the sweep of the beach behind us. I realized then how far we had walked, how tiny we must look from the land, two dots against the horizon. And I felt a surge of love for my mother, as if at that moment I might lose her to a rogue wave or a shallow swimming shark, for I knew they were out there cruising in the black water, just metres away.
“The sun's going down,�� I said.
“Time to go.��
And so we made our way in, the tide rising around our feet and the sky turning mauve then orange then molten yellow.��

I love that joyous, free dance at the edge of the void, fearless but tempered by love and kindness. That really stood out for me in this. Taylor has no moral or religious qualms about suicide, but she is deterred by the thought of what that act might do to the people she cares for.

As I'm sure most people do, I think about the narrative shape I imagine for my life, and in connection to this I was rather taken by a service that Taylor tells about her palliative care service providing. Her agency sent out volunteer “biographers,�� who visited patients and recorded their stories, to eventually provide bound copies to the families. Taylor's biographer died unexpectedly, but, of course, her memoir accomplishes something of the same purpose, and the process, as well as the thought of the finished product, are therapeutic. A novelist and screenwriter, Taylor explains

”In fiction you can sometimes be looser and less tidy, but for much of the time you are choosing what to exclude from your fictional world in order to make it hold the line against chaos. And that is what I'm doing now, in this, my final book: I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly. And I am making dying bearable for myself.
I don't know where I would be if I couldn't do this strange work. It has saved my life many times over the years, and it continues to do so now. For while my body is careering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other, vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go..��

A brave, lovely book.