IN THE SLENDER MARGIN

An eloquent, poetic, wistful, loving, meditative book on death and dying

Through time, human beings have used their imaginations to try to comprehend death and dying – through writing, painting, dancing, and singing. The Japanese dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote that “art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.” The same thing can be said about dying. This book has been twenty years in the making – the twenty years that poet Eve Joseph has spent working in hospice counselling and palliative care. Part memoir, part meditation, it is an exploration of death from an “insider's” point of view. Using the threads of her brother's early death and years of personal experience, Joseph also draws on history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of death and dying. She attempts to understand what she has seen – the mysterious and the horrific – with the light of art and the imagination. Her tales and reported conversations from the rooms of death are sometimes comic, sometimes grim, sometimes serene. They are all memorable. As a society we are endlessly fascinated by death. Every day, issues arise which raise questions about what it is like to die and how we do it. The growing death café movement, where people gather to talk about ideas related to death and dying – including assisted suicide – reflects a collective desire to openly address mortality without the usual sentimentality. In a secularized society where we have lost collective rituals and handed over the care of our dying to strangers, we are deeply curious about the intricacies, mysteries and practicalities of death. This book provides no easy answers, but does invite the reader to contemplate the human need for meaning in the face of death. While not religious, it will be seen as a spiritual book. While it's not prescriptive, many will find it a consolation, perhaps an inspiration. Certainly, as the baby-boomers age, it could not be more timely. EVE JOSEPH was born in 1953 and lives in Brentwood Bay, BC. Her two books of poetry, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award and in 2010 she was awarded the P.K. Page Founder's Award for poetry. When her essay “Intimate Strangers” won The Malahat Review's Creative Non-Fiction Prize, the final judge wrote about an “incandescent array of imagery, insight, allusion, even humour – and a daring lack of sentimentality.”