Season of Death: A Memoir

by Mark Raphael Baker

A thoughtful memoir on living well in the face of death.

Mark Raphael Baker was no stranger to death. Over seven years he had become a mourner three times for his first wife, for his brother and for his father. When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he began to reflect on their deaths, his probable death and on Death as, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a ‘season’ that produced a large and bitter harvest for the Baker family. Powerful and conflicting emotions assailed him, but their destructive power was always defeated by his love of his family and of life, which never deserted him even when his spirit was most weary. Over the short course of his illness, he came to realise that to love both truly, he must die as the most authentic version of himself he can achieve. It enabled him to die with humbling grace and dignity.

In A Season of Death, readers of The Fiftieth Gate and Thirty Days will rediscover the many forms of Mark’s humour, his candour and his depth of thought and feeling, albeit in a different key, as it must be when those virtues reveal themselves in expressions of vulnerability that fend off self-pity.

There is profound sorrow in this memoir but there is matching joy and much love, interwoven by a fine writer and thinker into a story that will deepen one’s understanding of life.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2024

About the author

As well as The Fiftieth Gate, A Journey Through Memory, a prize-winning book on his parents’ experience during the Holocaust, Mark Raphael Baker has written a compelling memoir, Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about death and grief. Both books are published by Text Publishing. He is currently writing a novel.

Reviews

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This heart-warming and heart-breaking memoir shines with Baker’s love for his family and his willingness/need to share with readers his coming to terms with his cancer diagnosis and imminent death. So deeply personal and articulate, his account of his grief over the premature deaths of his first wife (Kerryn) and brother (Johnny) offered a record of how he had dealt with his sorrow, but moreso, how he was dealing with his own illness within the support of his loving new family and his adult children. Most significant was his trust in his readers to share with him the rebuilding of his life after Kerryn’s death – his growing love for Michelle, their marriage, and the birth of his child, Melila. His memoir was truly a celebration of life and of his “authentic” self.

[Melissa Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not for me. I thought I would find it healing, reading about someone with pancreatic cancer after my mum died from pancreatic cancer, but this book made me angry. Angry at cancer, angry at the decisions the author made before and during his cancer, just angry in detail. This also reminded me of my own experience of chemo and all the anger I have associated with it.
Maybe I will appreciate it more when my anger has passed. Maybe the author was a narcissist, always putting himself first. Maybe maybe maybe.
I gave this 3 stars because it made me feel things, uncomfortable things, angry things and maybe it did help me with some of my thoughts around cancer. But this is not a book I would recommend to anyone.

[Di · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a seven-year period, Mark Baker buried his first wife Kerryn, his brother Johnny and then his father Yossl. He supported both Kerryn and Johnny through their rugged and ultimately unsuccessful cancer treatments. Mark re-married, and he and his second wife Michelle eventually, after many problems with conception, had a daughter. He delighted in his new wife and child but then, he too, was stricken with cancer.

This memoir was written by Mark as he endured treatment for pancreatic cancer and faced his mortality. It was edited posthumously by his wife Michelle and good friend Raymond Gaita. It is a moving account.

[Tom Swann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing expressing the love of life that brings great grief. I especially like how openly and wryly self critical he is, I guess having lost any reason for pretence. Some bits in the middle where I was a little less engaged but the view from the end of his life, the end of the book and the period where he was writing the book, has put it all in perspective. Deeply moved.