I came across Cory Taylor's book, Dying: A Memoir, on the Stella Prize longlist (the book also made shortlist). The Stella Prize is Australia's equivalent to the Baileys Prize for Women's for Fiction, which celebrates women's writing. In the case of the Stella Prize, however, they also include nonfiction as well as short stories. After reading last year's remarkable memoir by Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, a brutal but beautiful book about illness and death, I decided that I really need to pick up books more often about this subject. The books are not just about illness and mortality but are really as much and even more so about life, something I know I take far too much for granted. It's curious how a book that might potentially be so sad can ultimately make you see life and happiness differently and remind you how to live a good life.
Cory Taylor passed away in 2016 from a melanoma-related brain tumor. She was an award winning author and worked in film and television. Dying is about her illness, but more so, it is about her life. Is it a gift to know your death is coming (in a more concrete way than the abstract we all face) which enables you to plan and accomplish things? Maybe but perhaps not, since being ill means not being able to do all those things you meant to do when you were healthy.
When Taylor was diagnosed with her illness she felt she was as under-prepared as anyone could be. "It was as if I had stumbled out of a land of make-believe into the realm of the real." She begins her memoir by describing to the reader a euthanasia drug she purchased online from China to have as an option as he illness progressed. In Australia suicide is not illegal but anyone helping her would be punishable by jail time, so the drug is there to give her a sense of control--a last option if need be.
"That is why I started writing this book. Things are not as they should be. For so many of us, death has become the unmentionable thing, a monstrous silence. But this is no help to the dying, who are probably lonelier now than they have ever been. At least that is the way it feels to me."
So death becomes the mentionable in Cory's memoir. The first third of the book is about her experiences being diagnosed, knowing what she has is not curable, and coming to grips with the idea that her time might be short and ultimately how she will face death. She approaches the subject with eyes wide open and confronts what has been a taboo subject even taking on questions from the public on a program called "you can't ask that", though the questions end up being unsurprising--if she has a bucket list, the possibility of suicide and if she is religious. The questions become a sort of jumping off place for her to ruminate on what she thinks about these questions that we all wonder about but fear asking someone.
A couple of things (well quite a few but a couple have particularly stuck with me and I want to remember them) that really resonated with me are about "the life not lived". I often wonder about my choices and would I have been a happier and more fulfilled person if I had chosen differently. When someone asked about whether she had a 'bucket list':
"A bucket list implies a lack, a store of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry you haven't done enough with your life. It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don't have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven't done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren't for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip."
I always wonder about those 'sliding door' moments. You know, had I caught that train would my life have been very different than the fact that I did not? It is something I think about now a lot, if I should feel like my life has regrets, 'I wish I would have . . . ', but what she says about those small moments that might change a life is interesting and indeed comforting:
"The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you've actually lived. The other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps. This split between the dream and the reality can be the cause of intense dissatisfaction at times. But I am no longer plagued by restlessness. Now I see the life I've lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness. To envy the life of the alternative me, the one who stayed in Paris, or the one who became an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, seems like the purest folly."
But the book is not only about dying, the latter two sections are about her life growing up, her past history, her family and a reflection on the forces that created and formed her life.
"You do reflect on your past when you are dying. You look for patterns and turning points and wonder if any of it is significant. You have the urge to relate the story of your life for your children so that you can set the record straight, and so they can form some idea of where they came from."
She writes about her childhood, her parent's difficult relationship, her siblings. She had an interesting life filled with adventure and success as well as challenges and moments of difficulties. And maybe that is all we can, all of us, ask for in the end. Cory Taylor's story is not just a story of death and sadness but a reflection on what it means to live, too.