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Recovering from Mortality Novello Festival Press At the time that Deborah Cumming wrote Recovering from Mortality, she was living in a situation not widely recognized but shared by many people. She knew that she might die soon, yet she was not dying now. What is a person to think in this limbo time? How is a person to act? Rather than accept formulaic answers to these questions, she decided to discover her own path. She didn’t want to pass on her answers to others; she didn’t believe she knew universal answers. Nor was she interested in adding another story of a cancer patient who survived heroically or died movingly. She did want to commune with others in limbo, with people who might find it a lonely or mysterious condition. And she felt increasingly that she was talking about the human condition in general, for whether we acknowledge it or not, all our lives will end in the not-very-distant future. She felt she wanted to be in communication, not just with the dying, but with the living. This poignant collection of essays examines how we live our lives, in large and small ways. Friendship, family, neighbors, community—these help define who we are and Deborah Cumming writes about them with insight, and with heart.
Reviews “Deborah Cumming rises from these pages like a resurrected, fully alive spirit. Always truthful, she leads us without map or compass down her middle journey—the months after diagnosis but before extremity—while she still had time to meditate on death, and to pierce through it to live intensely. Her legacy to readers becomes our wish to live and die half so well.” “Deborah Cumming’s book is quite simply astonishing. It is a book that can change our lives. Written with grace and economy, it challenges us to remember that in the midst of life we are dying and that through that knowledge we can become, paradoxically, more alive. Keep it by your bedside and read one of her beautiful essays each night, or read the whole thing at once, and then read it again.” |
