Publisher's Weekly Review
In her sophomore outing, Egan (Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago) masters the art of imparting critical life advice without coming off as preachy-a difficult feat. The author, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, works as an end-of-life chaplain-a profession sometimes belittled by others (a woman at her book club asks her, "You consider this work?"), yet helpful to those who need a healing catharsis in the limited time left to them, such as a mother who bore her son out of wedlock and lied to him about the identity of his father, and a father who blames himself for his four-year-old son's death from meningitis. Egan is no stranger to sorrow herself, having experienced a psychotic break when doctors used ketamine during her emergency C-section, after her epidural anesthesia failed. Most of all, Egan's empathetic tone is a comfort for both the healthy and the dying-whom, she opines, are not polar opposites. "People don't somehow transform drastically into something else when they're dying," she says. "They're just doing something you haven't done yet." Egan also counsels that things are never as they appear, that there are layers to every decision, good and bad. As the title suggests, this is not just a book about dying. It's one that will inspire readers to make the most of every day. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As a hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling, 2004) sometimes finds it hard to tell curious outsiders what exactly she does on a day-to-day basis. When asked whether she gets paid to simply sit in a room with a patient, it's hard for Egan to deny that's most of what she does: sitting beside and listening to those with very little time left. But Egan's readers won't be fooled by her modesty. Her job, listening to dying patients' last wishes, last hopes, and tearful regrets, is a hard one. In these conversations, as Egan shares here, there is rarely any spiritual advice. There is hardly any talk about religion, or mention of God altogether. Instead, patients focus their thoughts on their families, on the person they once were, and, of course, on dancing, and how they wish they'd done more of it. These shared moments provide powerful insight for the reader, and for Egan, too, allowing her to overcome a dark shame from her own past. In this quick read, Egan takes readers on an emotional journey through many unforgettable lives.--Chesanek, Carissa Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IKE'S GAMBLE: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, by Michael Doran. (Free Press, $17.) In the early years of his administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower set out to woo President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. But instead of stabilizing the Middle East, the efforts helped further inflame the region. Doran's account offers a cautionary tale for contemporary diplomatic interventions. HUMAN ACTS, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $15.) The 1980 massacre of student protesters in South Korea is the subject of this novel, as a teenager searches for his best friend's corpse. Han, who won the Man Booker International Prize for "The Vegetarian," helps readers "witness the impossibly large spectrum of humanity, and wonder how it is that one end could be so different from the other," our reviewer, Nami Mun, wrote. OTHER MINDS: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) Humans and cephalopods appear to have little in common but share some crucial characteristics, including complex nervous systems. Godfrey-Smith's investigation takes him millions of years into the past and miles below sea level. As he put it: "When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all." HIMSELF, by Jess Kidd. (Washington Square Press/Atria, $16.) The supernatural and the past commingle in Kidd's debut novel. A mysterious letter leads Mahoney, a car thief in Dublin, back to his childhood village, where he was left at the door of an orphanage. As he untangles his family's history and coaxes out village gossip, he's joined by a bored, aging actress. "Add poisoned scones and letter bombs, and you have a fast-paced yarn that nimbly soars," our reviewer, Katharine Weber, said. ON LIVING, by Kerry Egan. (Riverhead, $16.) As a hospice chaplain, Egan writes, she deals in the "spiritual work of dying." Some patients asked her to share their stories, which resonate long after their death; Egan uses her book to recount them, along with reflections on her work and the issues surrounding end-of-life care. Together, these perspectives offer a guide for how to live with urgency and meaning. A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY, by Jonathan Lethem. (Vintage, $16.95.) Alexander Bruno - a debonair expat backgammon player with telepathic capabilities - travels the world beating wealthy opponents at the game. But when a tumor causes him to collapse during a high-stakes match in Berlin, he returns to California for an experimental treatment, on a wealthy childhood friend's dime.
Kirkus Review
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us, she writes. Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis. The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. It is through families, Egan began to realize, that we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear. The authors anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means living in the gray, where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify. A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
the stories we tell I never did become wise. Y'always think that when you get old, you're supposed to become wise. But here I am, fixin' to die, and I never did." Gloria's milky blue eyes widened and she raised her eyebrows. She laughed, just a little bit. "I'd have thought, with all I been through, that if anyone might could figure it all out before it was too late, it was me." She laughed again, a sort of rolling chuckle that interrupted her slow, drawling cadence. She laughed all the time. "You know." She leaned toward me and sunlight lit up the white baby fuzz on top of her head. "I always wished I could meet a writer, and tell him my stories, so other people could hear them and not make the same mistakes I made. I'd just give him my stories. I'd say, 'Here, take them and tell them.' And you know what crazy stories I've got. But I never did. I never did meet a writer." I was uncertain what to say. I had once written a book, more than ten years before, but I wasn't here as a writer now. Gloria was a hospice patient and I was her chaplain. I couldn't remember if I'd ever told her about my past, but I didn't think I had. "I used to pray for it all the time, that I might could meet someone," she continued. "But I guess that prayer won't ever be answered now." We fell silent, and I hoped Gloria would change the subject. She lifted her hands from the armrests and let them fall as she sighed heavily. "I never even leave this house. I'm stuck here. How could I ever meet a real writer now?" She looked at me, shook her head, and smiled. "I prayed and prayed and prayed. Some prayers just don't get answered, I suppose." She laughed, but this time it sounded sad. It was getting ridiculous. I hesitated for one more silent minute, then said, "Gloria, did I ever tell you I was once a writer?" "A real writer?" Her sparse eyebrows flew up again. "Yes, but it was a long time ago." "Like someone who wrote a book?" "Yes. Published and everything." She threw up her hands and looked at the ceiling. "All this time I've been waiting for a man, Jesus!" she yelled. She bounced just slightly in her recliner. She turned and looked at me. "I thought you'd be a man, Kerry! But this is it!" She rocked back and forth and spread her arms wide. "I can feel it! This is the answer. The Holy Spirit sent you to me, and I've already told you all my stories. Now you've just got to go write them down. Maybe they could help someone. Maybe someone else can get wise from them. Promise me you'll tell my stories." While a few patients before Gloria had told me that they wished other people could learn from their life stories-had even given me permission to share their stories with others-it was Gloria and the promise I made to her that led to this little book. I had been holding on to patientsÕ stories for many years by then, the stories that patients had poured out and puzzled over, the stories they turned over in their minds like the rosary beads and worn Bibles they turned over in their hands. I hoarded them, locked them away in my heart. Often, but not always, my patients found some measure of peace as we talked. Often, but not always, their faith in something good and greater than themselves was affirmed. Often, but not always, they found strength they didn't know they had to make amends with the people in their lives, and courage to move forward without fear toward their deaths. Always, they taught me something. We all have some experiences that we hold up as the stories that define our lives. Patients told me those stories, sometimes once or twice, and sometimes dozens of times over. Usually the way they told them changed with each telling. Not the basics of the story, but what they emphasized, the details, the connections they made between the details, and eventually, the connections they made between the various stories, even if the events they recounted happened decades apart. The meaning they found in their stories expanded and shifted. Almost always, their stories were about shame or grief or trauma: My child died in my arms when he was four. My wife left me for another man while I was a soldier far away. I killed someone. My father raped me. I drank my life away. My husband beat my children and I did nothing to stop it because I was afraid. I was not loved, and I don't know why. The stories confused them. How could these things possibly have happened, and what did it all mean? I donÕt know if listening to other peopleÕs life stories as they die can make you wise, but I do know that it can heal your soul. I know this because those stories healed mine. Just as was true for every one of my patients, something had happened to me, too. What I thought of as the story that had shaped my life up to that point was one I was ashamed of. I thought I was broken and cracked and could not be put back together again, that I was destroyed at the very deepest part of me, and that this was something that could never be made better. When I started working in hospice, I didn't yet understand that everyone-everyone-is broken and cracked. Just a few months after starting to work in hospice, I walked into the dark, run-down room of a nursing home patient whose chart said she had both colon cancer and advanced dementia. Instead of the weak, curled-up patient I expected, I found a beautiful woman with tightly set white curls on her head sitting ramrod straight on her bed. She was like an emaciated, blue-tinged china doll on the expanse of white institutional sheets. Instead of greeting me with the deep silence of end-stage dementia, she spoke in a broad New England accent about what it was like to lose pieces of your body, pieces you had never appreciated until they were gone. It can happen, even with end-stage dementia, that a patient will have moments, or even a day, of perfect clarity. As she talked about her many years of treatment for cancer, a pink flush crept up the papery skin of her neck and across her face. First her hands and then her whole body quivered. Her voice slowly got louder as her body got tenser. "I have no asshole!" she finally exploded. Her tiny white fists hit the bed in unison. Even using all her strength, she barely dented the sheets. "I can't shit!" She looked away and stared at the radiator intently. When she spoke again, her voice was a gravelly whisper. "Every person who came in that hospital room, they all stared down at me. They didn't actually see me. They didn't want to see me. They talked to me in baby talk like I'm an idiot. They looked at me and thought, 'I'm happy I'm not like her.' Even if they were nice, I knew they thanked God that they weren't me. I knew they only saw a crazy, pathetic old woman who doesn't even have an asshole." We sat in silence for a few seconds that felt like minutes. When she looked at me again, I said, "What you needed was compassion, but what you got was pity." "Yes." She sucked in air. "Yes, that's right. That's exactly right." She looked at me with surprise. She furrowed her eyebrows and said in a different voice, an almost-accusing voice, "You're very young." "I'm older than I look." "No. You're young," she said flatly. "How do you know these things?" "Well." I wasn't expecting that question. "Well, I've been through some hard things. I know what pity feels like." She sat up even straighter and pinned me with her eyes. "Why? What's your story? What happened to you?" I could feel heat prickle through my body. "I'd rather not say, because I'm here to talk about your life. My role as the hospice chaplain is to listen to you, to help you draw on your spiritual strengths to get through this time." I tried to sound professional. "You're ashamed." "No, no. Not at all." Suddenly I wanted to stand up and run. I could hear the ocean in my ears and feel my heart in my chest. I held on to the edge of the bed. "It's just that I know myself, and I know that if I start to talk about me, that's all I'll talk about, and that's not right, because I'm here to visit you and listen to you and not me. It's just not something I should talk about." I was lying, of course. I was ashamed, and she knew it. But she was also kind enough not to call me on it. Her brown eyes, bulging slightly from her bony eye sockets and sunken cheeks, stared into me. Then she reached for my hands and cleared her throat. "Whatever bad things have happened to you in your life, whatever hard things you've gone through, you have to do three things: You have to accept it. You have to be kind to it," she said slowly, squeezing my fingers together. "And listen to me. You have to let it be kind to you." I didn't understand what she meant. I didn't know how to let my hard thing be kind to me. I had an emergency C-section with my first baby. During the surgery, the epidural anesthesia failed. I could feel everything, but the dangerous part was that I was moving while I was still cut open. The emergency anesthesia I was given is called ketamine, a drug usually used only on horses, on battlefields, and at raves. It doesn't work the way a typical anesthetic does, by shutting off the body's ability to feel pain. Instead, it works as a "dissociative anesthesia"-that is, by severing the mind-body connection so that you do not recognize pain as such. In other words, it triggers a psychotic state. In my unlucky and unusual case, the state wasn't temporary. That drug-induced psychotic disorder lasted seven months. As a new mother I was suddenly plunged into a world of hallucinations, delusions, dissociation, suicidal ideation, and catatonia. I have almost no memories of my son's first half year of life, and I slept through the next eighteen months on a cocktail of powerful psychiatric medications. I got better, with the help of lots of therapy, drugs, and time. But I lost years of my life to that psychosis. And I was still deeply ashamed that I had lost my mind. I went back to see that dementia patient many times, always hoping, selfishly, to have another conversation. I wanted to learn what she'd meant, how she let the bad things that had happened be kind to her. But she never spoke a single word again. She couldn't even make or maintain eye contact. She lay in bed or in one of the huge padded vinyl recliners on wheels that nursing homes use for patients who have no control over their bodies. The dementia swallowed her back up. Only a curled-up and constricted body and a glazed silence remained. I would sit with her and sing to her, hold her hands if they didn't look painfully clenched. I don't know if it gave her any comfort at all. A few months later she died, alone in her dark room in the middle of the night. She likely had no memory of ever meeting me, but I've been holding on to and thinking about what she said ever since. About the wisdom to be found in stories like hers, and the kindness to be found even in our hardest things, even now, in the midst of living. ÒMommy.Ó My five-year-old son sighed deeply and looked at the box of applesauce cups on the counter. He grabbed both my hands as I tried to make school lunches before work. ÒMy have an idea.Ó This was always his opening gambit. ÒI know you need to go to work to make people die, but I really want to go to FriendlyÕs today.Ó He smiled and nodded. ÒSo? Mommy? Can we go to FriendlyÕs? For lunch? And ice cream? A make-your-own sundae? With gummy bears and rainbow sprinkles? You love FriendlyÕs! Yeah?Ó "Wait wait wait!" I said. He smiled a kindergarten smile, all gums and no teeth, and kept nodding his head. "Back up. What do you think I do at work?" "Make people die so they can go to Heaven," he said matter-of-factly. "But you can do that tomorrow and today we can go to Friendly's? Right? You love ice cream, too. You love it more than me. More than anybody. So let's go to Friendly's. People can die tomorrow." He nodded some more. He seemed remarkably calm that his mother was a Grim Reaper in clogs and pants that were always too snug in the waist, holding the power over life and death in the same hands that held his applesauce cup. For the record, I don't make people die. But I can't fault my son for not understanding what his mother did at work. Most people don't really know what chaplains do. Sometimes even other hospice workers have only a vague inkling, usually involving holding hands and saying the Hail Mary. I've had a hard time explaining it to others myself. "So I'm a little confused," a woman at a book club meeting once asked as we stood next to a tray of cheese and grapes. "What does a chaplain actually do?" "We're part of the hospice team, and our role is to offer spiritual care and support to patients, families, and staff," I said, my standard response, as I piled my plate with crackers and that delicious herb-crusted goat cheese you only get to eat at parties. "That means nothing to me," she replied. I ate a cracker. She tried again. "So tell me exactly what you did today at work." That day, I had been at a nursing home and had visited half a dozen indigent patients with end-stage dementia and no families. People with end-stage dementia are both the easiest and the hardest patients of all for a hospice chaplain. Like that porcelain doll patient, they sit, their tiny bodies curled and twisted in painful muscle contractions, in those huge padded recliners on wheels, with stuffed animals to comfort them. Their eyes, now enormous in sunken sockets, stare into the distance. Crusts form at the corners of their open mouths. Their skin tears like a wet tissue. They cannot speak, or walk, or feed themselves. In the last weeks or months-in a few of the saddest situations I've seen, even for long, lingering years before they finally die-they can no longer smile or hold up their heads. Excerpted from On Living by Kerry Egan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
