“…I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children’s lives will prove as lucky as my own. But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over”

Dying: a Memoir is Cory Taylor’s last book. Cory writes that she is sixty years old and dying of a melanoma-related brain cancer, and says: “…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”. When an author like Taylor turns her literary talent to a memoir on dying, the reader can expect it to be insightful, intelligent and even thought-provoking: “We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it”.

She observes: “A sudden death cuts out all the preliminaries, but I imagine it leaves behind a terrible regret for all things left permanently unspoken. A slow death, like mine, has one advantage. You have a lot of time to talk, to tell people how you feel, to try to make sense of the whole thing, of the life that is coming to a close, both for yourself, and those who remain”

What the reader might not expect from this subject is to laugh out loud, quite often: “If I’m afraid of anything it’s of dying badly, of getting caught up in some process that prolongs my life unnecessarily. I’ve put all the safeguards in place….My doctor has promised to honour my wishes, but I can’t help worrying. I haven’t died before, so I sometimes get a bad case of beginner’s nerves, but they soon pass”. Expectedly, much of the humour is black.

Taylor explores the euthanasia debate, and comments on the way Western society deals with the subject of death and dying (usually, not very well). For these observations alone, this book should be compulsory reading for the medical profession, especially those involved with palliative care.

She also relates her experience with the deaths of those close to her, and reflects on her life. Her earliest ambition was to be a writer: “The letters of the alphabet had this power. If you learned to draw them well and order them in the right way, you could tell anybody anything you liked, make a picture for them out of words, make them see what you saw”. This, as evidenced by awards and accolades won, was achieved in spades, so on the subject of regrets, she says she has none. Honest, profound and deeply moving.
4.5★s