In the Slender Margin
The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death.
Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as a child. In the Slender Margin is an insider's look at an experience that awaits us all, and that is at once deeply fascinating, frightening, and in modern society shunned. The book is an intimate invitation to consider death and our response to it without fear or morbidity, but rather with wonder and a curious mind.
Writing with a poet's precise language and in short meditative chapters leavened with insight, warmth, and occasional humor, Joseph cites her hospice experience as well as the writings of others across generations—from the realms of mythology, psychology, science, religion, history, and literature—to illuminate the many facets of dying and death. Offering examples from cultural traditions, practices, and beliefs from around the world, her book is at once an exploration of the unknowable and a very humane journey through the land of grief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Joseph (The Startled Heart) serves up luminous, poetic prose in this thoughtful look at dying, grief, burial, and how animals react to loss, among many related topics. The subtitle is apt, as she writes with defamiliarizing tenderness about an apparently familiar subject, asking, "Everything we love, we must leave. How is it we are not inconsolable?" As an antidote to our "death-denying culture," the author considers many aspects of death, including the personal (the death of her much older brother when she was 11), the cultural (the Pacific Northwest's indigenous Salish people cooking meals for their dead), and the linguistic ("The phrase six feet under originated in England in 1665"). The material is organized intuitively, not formally. Joseph moves freely from reflections on her brother's death to social history leavened with bits of arcana, and then to insights gleaned from working with hospice patients. These include her observation that "the language of the dying is not static; it is a language of movement and motion, of platforms, tickets, passports and maps, visitations and greetings, entrances and exits." Readers will discover an entire book full of such intuitive and satisfying musings.
