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In The Slender Margin
Part memoir, part meditation, this book is an exploration of death from an "insider's" point of view. Using the threads of her brother's early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a foray into the land of death and dying as seen through the lens of art and the imagination.
Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific.
Replete with literary allusions and references, from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D. H. Lawrence and Voltaire, this is an absolutely absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with it; a profoundly moving and helpful meditation on the mystery that awaits us all.
Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific.
Replete with literary allusions and references, from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D. H. Lawrence and Voltaire, this is an absolutely absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with it; a profoundly moving and helpful meditation on the mystery that awaits us all.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 22, 2014
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701 people want to read
About the author
Eve Joseph
7 books15 followersEve Joseph (born 1953) is a Canadian poet and author. Her books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin, was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
November 18, 2025
An excellent poetic memoir that rambles and meanders and yet never wanders away from a serene and scenic path. The path follows the reader, like a shadow, and the experience is entirely soulful.
Beautifully done. Excellent, contemplative, resonant. The language is poetic and lyrical, and imparts a feeling of intimacy and spaciousness.
This is a book I always recommend for those on an uncertain —and intimate— journey into strangeness.
Beautifully done. Excellent, contemplative, resonant. The language is poetic and lyrical, and imparts a feeling of intimacy and spaciousness.
This is a book I always recommend for those on an uncertain —and intimate— journey into strangeness.
September 28, 2016
Art is something that lies in the slender margins between the real and the unreal.
p192
Ej has written artfully of what she knows in this tender meditation on death and dying. The early tragic death of her brother and her immersion in another culture gave her a particular edge and she is blunt and delicate in describing her professional experience as care aid.
We are most deeply asleep at the switch...when we fancy we control any switches at all. pp45
We're terrified that no one really knows anything. It's hard to have a good death when one is in terror. pp42
hope allows us to imagine a future. On the other hand, if we're not careful, if we're too focused upon what we want to happen, we can miss what is happening right in front of us. p50
we often pray for some kind of divine intervention even when we're not sure what or whom we believe in. p73....apparently it works whether you believe in it or not p75
In a society that encourages us to shy away from death, we had to learn to walk towards it. p103
If there really is no getting around it, then a book like this is prerequisite
p192
Ej has written artfully of what she knows in this tender meditation on death and dying. The early tragic death of her brother and her immersion in another culture gave her a particular edge and she is blunt and delicate in describing her professional experience as care aid.
We are most deeply asleep at the switch...when we fancy we control any switches at all. pp45
We're terrified that no one really knows anything. It's hard to have a good death when one is in terror. pp42
hope allows us to imagine a future. On the other hand, if we're not careful, if we're too focused upon what we want to happen, we can miss what is happening right in front of us. p50
we often pray for some kind of divine intervention even when we're not sure what or whom we believe in. p73....apparently it works whether you believe in it or not p75
In a society that encourages us to shy away from death, we had to learn to walk towards it. p103
If there really is no getting around it, then a book like this is prerequisite
June 1, 2015
This is a book to savour, contemplate, re-read. Joseph lives on Vancouver Island, and worked for years as a counsellor for Victoria Hospice. This is a literate book, talking about both dying, and the impact of others' deaths on our lives. Her older brother was killed in a car accident when he was in his early 20's, and she much younger. This exploration is from one heart to another, informed by years of professional as well as personal experience, and with a broad expanse of history, literature, cultures, and art brought to the discussion of the exoerience we must ultimately go through personally, as well as with many others we have, and will, grieve. I am sure that each reader will have a personal experience and understanding of this beautiful and well written book
October 15, 2022
Beautiful writing. This subject matter was right on time...
July 24, 2014
In the Slender Margin is a kind of free-association memoir about the author's experiences as a hospice worker and her thoughts on how the living and the dying experience death. Interspersed throughout the book are quotes from poets and artists, stories about how other cultures have viewed and dealt with death, and interviews with those who deal with the bodies of the dead. If she raises more questions than she answers, this is only to be expected when writing of the mysterious topic of death.
April 12, 2021
I was sadly disappointed in this book. A strange mix of reflection on her work in palliative care, coming to terms with her brother's death, and literary-cultural conjecture on death, left me dissatisfied about halfway through all the way to the end. Death is a place of ambiguity, but Joseph leaves the reader without means of finding meaning in death beyond the subjective experience.
July 6, 2014
A tender, informative examination of death and dying. Eve Joseph brings to the topic the practical knowledge of her 20 years as a palliative social worker as well as the brilliant insight of a poet. Loved it.
March 8, 2023
"I did not set out to retrieve my brother or assuage an old grief when I began writing about death, and yet, it seems, he keeps serendipitously finding me."
The death of her older brother when she was a pre-teen permeates Eve Joseph's book, and it sometimes feels like we're observing a lengthy therapy session. A poet, Joseph's prose has a lyrical, descriptive quality that often meanders into the fantastic, before boomeranging back to the sometimes graphic physical realities she witnessed as a hospice worker. She examines the way various cultures handle their dead, while providing her readers with lessons in etymology of words associated with death, and has no shortage of literary references, particularly those found in poetry.
Many will find the language beautiful but the content seemed scattered and, ultimately, didn't provide any real comfort. In fact, Joseph discusses the decline of the traditional rituals that once surrounded death in the Western world, which showed respect for the dead and brought succor to the mourning. So many of those rituals are falling away, to the detriment of society, I think, leaving us all searching for meaning in books like this one, rather than looking to our families, our communities, and our God.
The death of her older brother when she was a pre-teen permeates Eve Joseph's book, and it sometimes feels like we're observing a lengthy therapy session. A poet, Joseph's prose has a lyrical, descriptive quality that often meanders into the fantastic, before boomeranging back to the sometimes graphic physical realities she witnessed as a hospice worker. She examines the way various cultures handle their dead, while providing her readers with lessons in etymology of words associated with death, and has no shortage of literary references, particularly those found in poetry.
Many will find the language beautiful but the content seemed scattered and, ultimately, didn't provide any real comfort. In fact, Joseph discusses the decline of the traditional rituals that once surrounded death in the Western world, which showed respect for the dead and brought succor to the mourning. So many of those rituals are falling away, to the detriment of society, I think, leaving us all searching for meaning in books like this one, rather than looking to our families, our communities, and our God.
February 8, 2017
so this is a book by a poet about her work with hospice patients and, therefore, death. I am a poet, I have been attracted to work with the dying or dead - though I haven't actually done any - and so I thought, yeah, cool, right up my alley.
actually, I found it annoying. I guess I was expecting just a lot of cool stories and anecdotes, and there are some. there were some informative bits, like it takes 9 months (average) for an unembalmed body straight in the earth to decay to bones. but mostly she seemed to have little to actually say. her much older brother died when she was 11 and she realized decades later that her death work was a way to come to terms with that. that's about her only solid realization, to be honest. the rest of it is a bunch of poetic sounding questions, which, yes, I know, I know, life is often more questions than answers. but why write a book then? just write poems, or a novel. or, write a book, but not this book. a book with more structure. I mean, she did some interesting things - she ended up married for a while to a hereditary chief of the salish, a northwest coast tribe, and at one point does this ritual where you cook for the dead and then burn the food - a ritual her mother had a strong reaction to. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had the bones of it not been submerged - that ceremony doesn't seem to have more weight than any other anecdote she tells about strangers. let's hear more about your salish mother in law who thinks you trail a string of ghosts behind you and who recommends cleansing rituals to you. let's be more forthcoming about the weight of your brother's death in your life. not much of a personal death, because she didn't know him that well, but certainly one with a huge impact on her family. let's parallel that whole story more explicitly with the stories from hospice, instead of stirring it all together under chapters that just blur into each other, each seeming to be the same blend of personal musing, anecdotes, and random facts.
and I do mean random facts. not just about death. random, and distracting, facts. "Unlike lion tamer Claude Beatty, who tamed his cats with a chair and a whip, we use our intellect to try to bargain with death, thinking we can make a deal, forgetting there is a wildness at the heart of it." I find this sentence incredibly annoying. first of all, there is no need to name a lion tamer. if you've seen a cartoon with lion taming in it, you've seen whips and chairs. it's the stereotype. but more than that, why is the lion tamer bit in there AT ALL? to contrast with intellect? "rather than use a chair and a whip, we use our minds to bargain with death". huh? also, is it really the *intellect* that tries to bargain with forces we can't control? wouldn't the intellect be the part of us that knows that is no use? and it's not useless because death has a wildness at the heart of it. it's not that we make a bargain with death, and death agrees, but then reneges because, darn it, it's just so wild. it's useless because death is an impersonal force that you can't communicate with. I think she should have stuck to poetry - you can get away with this kind of thing there, sticking lion tamers in where they don't belong. even then, it would have been better if the poem talks about trying to tame death with a whip and a chair, then trying to strike a bargain after the chair is splintered and the whip cannot sting death (ha) even as the claws descend. so this poetry doesn't make a good sentence and this sentence doesn't make good poetry.
or this nonsense: "Eight year old Spencer Wyatt, of Dacula, Georgia, was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was three. His assistance dog, Lucia, stays with him day and night and summons help if he's having a seizure. We fight death with everything in our arsenal - when machines fail us, we call out the pack." this was from a section where she was apparently thinking dogs and death, what are the connections I can brainstorm? again, completely distracting fact where she introduces this character, name, town, dog's name, age of diagnosis, all that, as if he's going to figure. nope. that one sentence is all you ever hear of him and why the hell are we hearing of him specifically? does she know his mom? is this just a shout out? did she do a kickstarter for this book with a reward of getting your kid's name mentioned? because this doesn't have anything to do with death anyway. this is about a seizure dog. that kid is not unique in having one. then, the vague assertion. "when machines fail us, we call out the pack". what on earth does that mean? literally, it makes no sense. "well, I'm sorry charles, but we're not able to keep you alive with this respirator anymore. we're bringing in a group of dogs." does it mean we turn to our community? ugh.
a bit later on from these two quotes, she writes at the start of a paragraph, out of nowhere, "Why is it that trivia catches my attention? Da Vinci believed that the heart was of such density that fire could not destroy it." ok, that question? that is not a question for your readers. we'll take the answer, if you have one, but we don't know you, we don't know why trivia catches your attention. we've seen you reporting it in complete non sequiturs, certainly.
I read a bit of a review that remarked that the book was a "free-association meditation", and that captures it perfectly. that's not really something I want to read, however. most of the reviewers seem to love it. not me.
actually, I found it annoying. I guess I was expecting just a lot of cool stories and anecdotes, and there are some. there were some informative bits, like it takes 9 months (average) for an unembalmed body straight in the earth to decay to bones. but mostly she seemed to have little to actually say. her much older brother died when she was 11 and she realized decades later that her death work was a way to come to terms with that. that's about her only solid realization, to be honest. the rest of it is a bunch of poetic sounding questions, which, yes, I know, I know, life is often more questions than answers. but why write a book then? just write poems, or a novel. or, write a book, but not this book. a book with more structure. I mean, she did some interesting things - she ended up married for a while to a hereditary chief of the salish, a northwest coast tribe, and at one point does this ritual where you cook for the dead and then burn the food - a ritual her mother had a strong reaction to. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had the bones of it not been submerged - that ceremony doesn't seem to have more weight than any other anecdote she tells about strangers. let's hear more about your salish mother in law who thinks you trail a string of ghosts behind you and who recommends cleansing rituals to you. let's be more forthcoming about the weight of your brother's death in your life. not much of a personal death, because she didn't know him that well, but certainly one with a huge impact on her family. let's parallel that whole story more explicitly with the stories from hospice, instead of stirring it all together under chapters that just blur into each other, each seeming to be the same blend of personal musing, anecdotes, and random facts.
and I do mean random facts. not just about death. random, and distracting, facts. "Unlike lion tamer Claude Beatty, who tamed his cats with a chair and a whip, we use our intellect to try to bargain with death, thinking we can make a deal, forgetting there is a wildness at the heart of it." I find this sentence incredibly annoying. first of all, there is no need to name a lion tamer. if you've seen a cartoon with lion taming in it, you've seen whips and chairs. it's the stereotype. but more than that, why is the lion tamer bit in there AT ALL? to contrast with intellect? "rather than use a chair and a whip, we use our minds to bargain with death". huh? also, is it really the *intellect* that tries to bargain with forces we can't control? wouldn't the intellect be the part of us that knows that is no use? and it's not useless because death has a wildness at the heart of it. it's not that we make a bargain with death, and death agrees, but then reneges because, darn it, it's just so wild. it's useless because death is an impersonal force that you can't communicate with. I think she should have stuck to poetry - you can get away with this kind of thing there, sticking lion tamers in where they don't belong. even then, it would have been better if the poem talks about trying to tame death with a whip and a chair, then trying to strike a bargain after the chair is splintered and the whip cannot sting death (ha) even as the claws descend. so this poetry doesn't make a good sentence and this sentence doesn't make good poetry.
or this nonsense: "Eight year old Spencer Wyatt, of Dacula, Georgia, was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was three. His assistance dog, Lucia, stays with him day and night and summons help if he's having a seizure. We fight death with everything in our arsenal - when machines fail us, we call out the pack." this was from a section where she was apparently thinking dogs and death, what are the connections I can brainstorm? again, completely distracting fact where she introduces this character, name, town, dog's name, age of diagnosis, all that, as if he's going to figure. nope. that one sentence is all you ever hear of him and why the hell are we hearing of him specifically? does she know his mom? is this just a shout out? did she do a kickstarter for this book with a reward of getting your kid's name mentioned? because this doesn't have anything to do with death anyway. this is about a seizure dog. that kid is not unique in having one. then, the vague assertion. "when machines fail us, we call out the pack". what on earth does that mean? literally, it makes no sense. "well, I'm sorry charles, but we're not able to keep you alive with this respirator anymore. we're bringing in a group of dogs." does it mean we turn to our community? ugh.
a bit later on from these two quotes, she writes at the start of a paragraph, out of nowhere, "Why is it that trivia catches my attention? Da Vinci believed that the heart was of such density that fire could not destroy it." ok, that question? that is not a question for your readers. we'll take the answer, if you have one, but we don't know you, we don't know why trivia catches your attention. we've seen you reporting it in complete non sequiturs, certainly.
I read a bit of a review that remarked that the book was a "free-association meditation", and that captures it perfectly. that's not really something I want to read, however. most of the reviewers seem to love it. not me.
May 13, 2016
A tender, mindful, cross-cultural compendium of stories, facts, and hints. A book that skirts the threshold that we all will cross. Eve Joseph worked in the hospice/palliative care field for over 20 years, lost her older brother to a car accident, and has been relentlessly curious about the "slender margin" we traverse when close to death. A gentle tone pervades the book, and it's full of wisdom:
~ ... there is no silence as perfect as that of the shell-shocked bereaved trying to be brave.
~ From the Old English hopian, meaning "to wish, expect, look forward to something," hope allows us to imagine a future. On the other hand, if we're not careful, if we're too focused on what we want to happen, we can miss what is happening right in front of us. Hope can be a thief. It can steal the present moment right out from under our feet.
~ "God is, or He is not," wrote Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. But which side to choose? His wager, as it was known, went something like this: weigh the gain and teh loss in wagering that God is ... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
~ "Estrangement is at the root of suffering," writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman in Jewish Pastoral Care. Caregivers must find the stranger in themselves to understand what it might be like for the dying who are becoming estranged from all that is known.
~ "One leaf falling can occupy me all day." -- Quoted by a man who was very close to death.
~ With death, wrote P.K. Page, there is a divide between here and there. Were it not, she noted, for the inconsequential t, the words would be identical.
~ There are cemetaries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness ...
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs.
~ Pablo Neruda, 1926
~ These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.
~ Adelaide Crapsey, "Triad"
~ ... there is no silence as perfect as that of the shell-shocked bereaved trying to be brave.
~ From the Old English hopian, meaning "to wish, expect, look forward to something," hope allows us to imagine a future. On the other hand, if we're not careful, if we're too focused on what we want to happen, we can miss what is happening right in front of us. Hope can be a thief. It can steal the present moment right out from under our feet.
~ "God is, or He is not," wrote Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. But which side to choose? His wager, as it was known, went something like this: weigh the gain and teh loss in wagering that God is ... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
~ "Estrangement is at the root of suffering," writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman in Jewish Pastoral Care. Caregivers must find the stranger in themselves to understand what it might be like for the dying who are becoming estranged from all that is known.
~ "One leaf falling can occupy me all day." -- Quoted by a man who was very close to death.
~ With death, wrote P.K. Page, there is a divide between here and there. Were it not, she noted, for the inconsequential t, the words would be identical.
~ There are cemetaries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness ...
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs.
~ Pablo Neruda, 1926
~ These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.
~ Adelaide Crapsey, "Triad"
February 21, 2017
A meditation on death--including religious, mythological, anthropological, and some (just a few) medical musings about the endings of our human lives--Joseph's book put me in mind of poet Diane Ackerman's discursive nonfiction. The book has some of the strengths and (to my mind) suffers from some of the same (occasionally annoying) poetic excesses as Ackerman's. At times, the writing felt too pretty and precious to be genuine--drawing attention to itself rather than illuminating the subject. The title, however, really hits the mark: dying IS an act of intimate strangeness, and there ARE sections of the book in which Joseph--who has long worked in palliative care--does indeed convey this. Recommended with some reservations.
July 25, 2021
I am so fortunate to have discovered this book when I needed it most. It is just over a month after my mother’s death and on this journey of grief I have been in search of understanding and my own thoughts. Eve Joseph your insight has brought me to a new level of faith in my experiences of life and death.
May 25, 2016
one of the early (1985) workers in the Palliative Care field writes poetically & insightfully about death, dying, and ministering & administering to those who leave
December 11, 2023
Eve Joseph, award-winning poet, and former hospice counselor explores various facets of death - the personal, marked by her brother's demise when she was a pre-teen; the cultural, illustrated through religious rituals; the figures of mythology, and even the linguistic aspects which surround our concepts of death, such as the origin of phrases related to dying. In a way, this is Joseph's magnum opus, a tribute to understanding death later in life in a way she was unable to as an 11-year-old. Although Joseph has plenty of citings, the contents of her work are not academically presented but arranged more poetically. Joseph seamlessly transitions between reflections about her grief, historical anecdotes interwoven with lesser-known trivia about society, and insights from working closely with patients in hospice care.
Her observation "When families traditionally worked with the dying, death was once like living in a cave with a sleeping dragon, which we knew how to coexist with even though we it feared most" is an example of the numerous intuitive contemplations that readers will find enlightening. For some of us who have cared for our sick and dying loved ones, many of her observations will feel very familiar.
Her observation "When families traditionally worked with the dying, death was once like living in a cave with a sleeping dragon, which we knew how to coexist with even though we it feared most" is an example of the numerous intuitive contemplations that readers will find enlightening. For some of us who have cared for our sick and dying loved ones, many of her observations will feel very familiar.
December 17, 2018
The amount of research that went into this book blew my mind. Joseph has taken the topic of death and explored it from what feels like every possible angle: “history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture” (Amazon). Reflecting on her experiences as a hospice care worker and the death of her brother when she was a young girl throughout, she examines the question of what happens to us when we die, how those left behind (in various cultures) navigate the transition, and why the language of poetry is akin to the language of death. Personal, powerful, and evocative.
January 7, 2021
The subtitle--The Intimate Strangeness of Dying--captures it perfectly. The memoir was tender and thought-provoking. As a hospice volunteer myself, it was a comfort to read this book redolent with stories, thoughts, questions about death and dying from someone who has worked in palliative care for 20 years. I, too, am never certain what draws me to this work or why some deaths linger with us. Experiencing Joseph's loss of her brother and her subsequent working through the process has helped me through some of my own losses.
January 10, 2024
Fascinating
Not sure what I expected from this book I am not generally a fan of nonfiction. Perhaps it’s my age makes me more cognizant of death than ever before and that makes me want to delve into the subject. The author worked for many years as a palliative care counselor. Beautifully written with short chapters that also add to its charm. I am beginning to think the more death is discussed the less fear there is of it.
Not sure what I expected from this book I am not generally a fan of nonfiction. Perhaps it’s my age makes me more cognizant of death than ever before and that makes me want to delve into the subject. The author worked for many years as a palliative care counselor. Beautifully written with short chapters that also add to its charm. I am beginning to think the more death is discussed the less fear there is of it.
July 30, 2017
A lovely book! I kept talking about "this book I'm reading" to friends and family. I was moved by the stories - her own, as well as her family members and of those in hospice care taking their final journey. It's full of cultural, and historical references, and quite informative, but it reads like poetry. I wish my review for this book was as well written!
May 9, 2019
An honest, erudite exploration of death and how Western society copes with it.
The author does a thorough job of examining her own feelings about death, and shares her opinions of her society’s attempts to deal with its ugly parts as well as its mysterious and beautiful parts. She does a good job of relating the professional and personal.
The author does a thorough job of examining her own feelings about death, and shares her opinions of her society’s attempts to deal with its ugly parts as well as its mysterious and beautiful parts. She does a good job of relating the professional and personal.
January 11, 2020
Thought this might be an emotionally difficult read, but was not. I was quite comforted by these essays, that explore death. I had no idea that this poet had spent years working with the dead and dying in hospices. Part auto-biography, history, even trivia, I found this book fascinating and heart-warming. So glad I decided to read this engrossing book.
January 18, 2021
A beautifully written book with an insightful perspective on death based on the author’s life experiences, including those with personal loss, palliative care, and hospices, as well as her background as a poet. This book is “all over the place” in a helpful way, bringing in quotations from a variety of cultures, contemporary writers, classical myth, religion, and art.
March 8, 2021
Easy read. Did not make my head hurt but the writing provoked some thought on death and dying. Not my genre of choice as I read it as a part of book group. Author focuses and comes back to the unexpected early death of her brother, weaving his life details throughout the book. Running parallel to that story is the author's experiences as a social worker in the area of palliative care.
October 11, 2021
A lovely book of her experiences with death in her family and then as a hospice worker for several years. She quotes many others. One I marked was 'Music began with a howl lamenting a loss. The howl became a prayer and from the hope in the prayer started music, which can never forget its origin. In it, hope and loss are a pair' (British artist and writer John Berger).
May 13, 2025
I think if you know grief in any way shape or form this will be an excellent read. Or if you’re interested in death and dying, especially when it pertains to how other cultures treat their dead. This book helped me fear death less and also acknowledge that I’ll have to carry my grief with me but that it won’t always feel so heavy.
March 7, 2021
Wonderfully thought-provoking and well-written. No "answers," if that is what you're looking for in a book about death and dying. Instead, lovingly intimate truths that are often difficult, clearly reflected upon...a beautiful book.
May 16, 2021
I wasn't surpised to read that the author is a poet; the writing in this book has the sense of poetry. This is a beautifully written batch of essays about dying written by hospice social worker. I spread the essays out over time to digest them. This a lovely, thoughtful book.
April 20, 2018
This is an extraordinary book. A love letter to the dying and the people that support them. Poignant, beautiful, sad, hopeful.
June 27, 2019
I liked it well enough, but I don't think this was the right book at the right time for me.
January 5, 2020
By far one of the best death books I've read so far. (Out of dozens) Poetic and thoughtful without being prescriptive.
November 19, 2023
This was lovely to read. It was weirdly very pleasant to spend time with this book thinking about death.
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