Losing a loved one is difficult. Processing the many feelings about the loss is different for everyone.
Studies show that coming to terms with ones mortality can be achieved through a better understanding of end-of-life. As “epiloguers,” we strive to collaboratively create our concluding piece at the end of our journey, facing the reality of death, and embracing a positive approach to living each day.
The Epiloguers Book Club aims to create a safe space for people to gather and discuss death and dying.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. This group is facilitated by community member Karen Quasney, we’re happy to connect you with her. This group meets on the last Thursday of every other month.
June’s “The Epiloguers” selection is Getting to Know Death by Gail Godwin. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop. (Book club members take 10% off book club reads!) Join us in June to discuss!
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From New York Times-bestselling, three-time National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin, a consideration of what makes for a life well lived-for readers of Oliver Sacks's Gratitude and Deborah Levy's Cost of Living.
I can't see a way out of this.
Things will not necessarily get better.
This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.
Ingmar Bergman once said that an artist should always have one work between himself and death. When renowned author Gail Godwin tripped and broke her neck while watering the dogwood tree in her garden at age eighty-five, a lifetime of writing and publishing behind her and a half-finished novel in tow, Bergman's idea quickly unfurled in front of her, forcing her to confront a creative life interrupted. In Getting to Know Death, Godwin shares what spoke to her while in a desperate place. Remembering those she has loved and survived, including a brother and father lost to suicide, and finding meaning in the encounters she has with other patients as she heals, she takes stock of a life toward the end of its long graceful arc, finding her path through the words she has written and the people she has loved.
At once beautiful, biting, precise, poetic, and propulsive, Getting to Know Death is her own reckoning with the meaning of a life, the forms of passion that guide it, and how the stories we hold can shape our memories and preserve our selves as we write our own endings.