Dying: A Memoir
By Cory Taylor.
Published by Canongate.
A kookaburra swoops down from a branch, spears a lizard and gobbles it down live. Gulp. Gone. As a curious young child in her Queensland garden, author Cory Taylor remembers this sunlit scene as her “moment of coming into consciousness”.
“Things live until they die,” she writes in this slim, intellectual memoir that serves as a reminder, amid the omni-shambles of today’s world, that life is transient and death final. Her message is clear: Count. Your. Blessings.
When Taylor was diagnosed in 2005 with skin cancer, she did just that. She was an Australian scriptwriter spurred on to write the first of two celebrated novels (Me and Mr Booker, and My Beautiful Enemy), all the while defying the medical odds for more than a decade.
Her short memoir, written in the months before her death in July, and praised in advance by the likes of Julian Barnes and Margaret Drabble, is an unsentimental addition to the dying-lit genre so loved by ageing baby boomers. (Only last week an article headed My Deathbed Playlist made it into the New York Times’ “best read” list.)
Taylor divides her thoughts into just three chapters, the first a philosophical look at death, the second an odyssey through her family history, and the third a review of her life that blends both subjects. The result is blessedly free from self pity, won’t elicit tears, yet is not without humour. When struggling to cope with the loneliness of dying, she is offered six free counselling sessions by her GP. The form requires a description of her “problem”.
“Dying,” she says. “Insufficient,” he retorts. They settle on “adjustment disorder”.
Her battle with her “adjustment disorder”, the “Exit” meetings with fellow sufferers and the politics of buying euthanasia drugs online are all interesting but it’s Taylor’s family history that gives this book its emotion.
She was the youngest of three children and grew up particularly close to her mother. The family was forced into a peripatetic life by Taylor’s manipulative father, a pilot by profession who dragged them around Australia, then on to sunnier climes in Fiji and Africa. “All that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out. In my beginning is my end.”
Her parents’ divorce and eventual deaths shape her thoughts on how to die well, much of which will resonate with her audience — the martyrdom squabbles over caring for sick parents, the what-to-do-with-the-ashes, the resentment about who was the favourite.
It feels like a plea to the reader to do it better than she and her siblings did: her brother Eliot didn’t tell her that her father had died for three months.
After 60 years on earth, what will she miss most? Not the Amazon deliveries, Netflix downloads or other fatuous obsessions that crowd our modern-day lives.
No, Taylor will miss her Japanese husband of 31 years, Shin, to whom she dedicates this book, as well as the “faces of her two sons”. They are the undeveloped mystery characters in her memoir.
At the doorway to death, and confined to just two rooms in her house, Taylor yearns for something as basic as the sun on her face and the feel of the wind and the rain.
Towards the end of this short book, she reverts to being a scriptwriter, penning highlights of her life in the form of a shaky Super 8 film. “A girl with a dog in dappled sunshine...on a beach with palm trees, arm in arm with her mother in some outback moonscape. A kookaburra sits on a branch laughing…”
Her luminous voice, touching on the fragility of life, the randomness of death and the unannounced appearance of a kookaburra in all our lives, is one worth listening to.