Our Long Marvelous Dying

Book excerpt: Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end. In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street. Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them. Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.