This slim volume is a writer’s last will and testament. In it, award-winning Australian novelist Cory Taylor (Me And Mr Booker), who passed away on July 5, takes stock of her life and states her final wishes.
At the time of writing, 61-year-old Taylor knew she was dying of an untreatable brain cancer, and weighed less than her neighbour’s retriever.
This is ‘my final book: I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly’, she writes. ‘And I am making dying bearable for myself.’
In lucid, precise, unsentimental prose, she makes a powerful case for assisted dying, answers a series of questions that people always want to ask the dying, and reflects on the life she has lived and the imminent extinction that now awaits her.
Strikingly perhaps, she writes less about her current life, the obviously very happy relationships she enjoys with her children and her husband Shin. Instead, she focuses more on the unresolved tensions and disputes of her past, especially difficulties and disappointments with siblings and parents.
Reconciliation is her dying wish. Taylor wrote the book in a creative burst over a few brief weeks, and died soon after.
One hopes that the composition of this clear-sighted essay helped to sustain her during the final phase of her life, just as its clear-sighted and realistic compassion might have something to teach any mortal.
As she says, ‘We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.’
