Accompanied by Books

Tending to Endings (sixty-six)

As John and I continue on his transplant journey (which truly is still going about as good as a liver cancer odyssey can go), I find myself jotting down things I want to eventually write about here. I don’t finish as many projects during times of upheaval, but journaling about life’s complicated times helps me to understand my own thoughts and questions in the midst of it all. It also helps me to feel connected to others.

I will post more often again soon, and in the meantime, I want to share a few of the books (four nonfiction, three novels) I’ve read during the first half of this year. These include themes relevant to Tending to Endings, and they also contain a hard-to-describe quality that is key for me when my life feels upended. Some people want escape books during hard times (for that I have the Great British Baking Show!) what I want is an author who engages with the hugeness and complexity of living with intelligence and heart. During what has so far been a very strange year, these books have been conversation partners, teachers, honest friends.

Nonfiction

The Grieving Brain, By Mary-Frances O’Connor

People often ask me to recommend a book about grief. What they mean, I think, is something full of helpful advice. But the books that are generally most helpful to me are either deeper dives into the research or stories in the form of memoir or fiction. Self-help books have the tendency to make me want to look behind to curtain to see what has framed this author’s theory and experience on grief. I just don’t relax into them very often, the way some people do.

However, now I have a one I can recommend that kind of straddles all three of those categories (research, self-help, memoir)!  Mary Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist who is also a storyteller and clearly wants to be helpful. I learned much from her book that I think others will appreciate as well.

Her introduction describes the visceral experience of grief, and why it is disorienting as well as painful:

Losing our one-and-only overwhelms us, because we need our loved ones as much as we need food and water…Fortunately, the brain is good at solving problems. In fact, the brain exists for precisely this function. After decades of research, I realized that the brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one. Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together with our loved one and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.

This (20 min) clip from Arizona Public Media will give you a taste of O’Connor’s voice and focus as well as some really useful information:

---

The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Green

John and I listened to this series of essays on one of our many trips to and from Salt Lake City for medical tests and procedures this spring and both of us loved it. Green has a way of toggling between big philosophical questions and specific moments in life in ways that are insightful, poignant, and often funny. This three-minute clip will give you and idea of his style and tone.

You can also find versions of many of these essays as a podcast under the same name. I prefer the book version on audio because the essays are shaped into a more connected whole.

---

The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book has been around a while, but I just finally read it. It helped me to see the landscape of the whole field of cancer and cancer research in a more three-dimensional way.  It focuses on the people who have researched cancer and some of the political forces that have steered money and research in particular directions. It also gives insight into why cancer is a particularly difficult riddle to solve. The book is very readable, and while it gives no simple answers to cancer or anything else, I feel more prepared to join the conversation about treatment options because I have more understanding of the research and forces from which they arose.

This three minute video gives a brief introduction to both the book and the PBS series that followed:

---

Beauty, by John O’Donohue

If you have not read any John O’Donohue yet, I would recommend starting with Anam Cara which also discusses death (and many other stages of life) in ways that are insightful and true. If you already love John O’Dononue’s work, then I think you will appreciate this one. I’m including it here, because when I got to chapter on death, I immediately began writing down quotes, like this one that mirrors my own cultural experience and explains some of what prompted me to begin exploring the end-of-life field:

Where time is money no-one really wants to focus on that edge where time runs out on you. Our education system never really considers it; we have no pedagogy of death. Consequently, death is something we are left to deal with in the isolation of our own life and family. When death visits, there is no cultural webbing to lighten the blow. Death can have a clean strike because the space is clear. Against this background, it is not surprising that we are never told that one of the greatest days’ work we could ever do in the world is to help someone to die.

And in a section titled “Deathbed as Altar,” Donohue offers wisdom I wish I had available to me the first time I was with a friend during her last moments of life:

If you attend reverently and listen tenderly, you will be given the words that are needed. It is as if these words make a raft to carry the person over to the further shore. We should not allow ourselves to settle for being awkward and unsure around a deathbed. There is vital and beautiful work to be done there. When you realize that the dying person needs and depends on your words and presence, it takes the focus off your limitation and frees you to become a creative companion on that new journey. One of the most beautiful gifts you could ever give is the gift of helping someone die with dignity, graciousness and serenity.

On this homepage that honors John O’Donohue (who died in 2008), you can watch a short clip of the author speaking about connection to landscape and also find a link to a one-hour conversation from his interview with On Being‘s Krista Tippett.

---

Fiction

These novels are all share a similar structure of using multiple narrators to tell a story that traverses across time, geography, culture, and perspective. Loss and grief are central to each story in ways that beautiful and true and, for me, helpful.

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

As soon as I began reading this book, I wished I could share it with my mom I because she was the person who first recommended Erdrich’s writing to me and I knew she would get a kick out of the voice and the sense of humor. Also, it is a ghost story that takes place in an independent bookstore! The Sentence tackles tragic topics such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd with humility and honesty and attention to their emotional complexity and real consequences. The fact that all of this is accomplished in one book that is captivating and enjoyable to read is remarkable!

For those who want to visit with Louise Erdrich in her famous bookstore where some of this story is set, this (6 min) video is a gem!

---

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr

I have long considered everything Anthony Doerr writes to be a poem as well a a beautiful example of whatever else it is–novel, short story, essay in Orion Magazine. This is because he writes to the essence of things and attends to language so elegantly that whatever he writes comes through as a beautiful whole. A work of art.

Still, I have to admit, I was a little skeptical as I listened to the first chapters of this weirdly titled book, wondering how in the world Anthony Doerr was going to pull this one together! There are so many intricate parts that were interesting in themselves, but that span centuries and geographies and imaginations. I began to worry that maybe this time he was trying to be a little too fancy. Should this be a few different books?

About one-third of the way through, I saw it. And, I went back to the beginning and completely enjoyed re listening, this time noticing all those breadcrumbs leading me to the heart of the story.

In this interview, in addition to learning more about the Cloud Cuckoo Land and Doerr’s process of writing it, you’ll see lots of footage of beautiful, McCall, Idaho which served as inspiration for one of the book’s settings. It also made me laugh that Doerr had a similar feeling I did part way into writing the novel (This is never going to work!)

This story is about all the things I worry about and care about and love. So far, this is my favorite book I’ve read in 2022, and probably in quite a long time. It is a novel that is also a poem. I hope you’ll read it.

---

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

In this four-minute video, Elif Shafak reads a passage from the book that is written from the point-of-view of a fig tree. There are many stories, storytellers and themes contained in this book. It is about immigrating and war crimes and family and loss of a parent and loss of a child and brutality and bullying and being between two or three different cultures. It is about ancestors and politics and young love and old love. And, it is about a fig tree with an amazing story to tell.

---

What books have accompanied you through hard times? I’d love to read about the stories that have befriended you! Feel free to leave titles and a bit about why they were helpful to you in the comments section. Or, you are always welcome to email me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings by email as soon as it publishes, please leave your name and email below. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

Thank you for being here,

Laura

First Name

Last Name

Email address:

Leave this field empty if you’re human: