Dying to Know – bringing death to life
Julia Brown introduces an unusual new book about death
Witty. Reassuring. Cheerful. These are perhaps unexpected qualities to find in a book called Dying to Know – bringing death to life. But then it is an unusual book. Set out as a series of sixty ‘conversation starters’ or ‘thought buds’, accompanied by striking images, Dying to Know aims to help us to celebrate life more fully, by beginning to talk about the experience we find it hardest to come to terms with. Death. Published in the UK this week, the book is the brainchild of Jane Tewson, the ‘social innovator’ who co-founded Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. Jane emigrated from the UK ten years ago to set up Pilotlight Australia (www.pilotlight.org.au), a small charity that exists, as she puts it, to ‘spark ideas and projects to ignite positive social change’.
The book is the result of collaboration between Jane and a creative team including the book’s writer, Andrew Anastasios, and is based on consultation with a range of people including families, health professionals, people with a terminal illness and faith leaders. It is also partly inspired by Jane’s personal experience of close encounters with death – and of the affirmation of life that a heightened awareness of death can bring.
In 2001, Jane was diagnosed with a borderline ovarian tumour. ‘Ovarian cancer is the most fatal gynaecological cancer’, she says. ‘In Australia, seventy-eight per cent of women diagnosed with it will die within two years. Luckily, my tumour was caught in time. But during that period in my life, I became close friends with an amazing woman called Kerry Hancock, who went on to die of ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-six. Watching Kerry and her family live through her illness made me realise – as a Brit living in Australia – that people everywhere find it difficult to know how to respond when someone is dying. In Dying to Know we talk about simple, practical ways to respond – like taking a meal to a grieving friend. But the book is really a reminder to celebrate life – and the people we care about – while we can.’
In Australia, where it was published in 2007, Dying to Know has sold around 35,000 copies, and is being used in schools, workplaces, health settings and by friends and families to begin to think and talk about death as a ‘fact of life’.
‘Death is something that links us all’, says Jane Tewson. ‘It’s one thing we all have in common. Yet no one seems to want to talk about it. For many of us, death has become – somewhat ironically in this permissive age – a modern taboo. But we hope Dying to Know can help people to think and talk about death in ways which are empowering – rather than depressing. Whatever stage of life we’re at, I think these conversations can connect us with each other on a profound level.’
Each short section of the book contains a simple action to take, a question to think about, a quote to laugh at, or simple information on about complex issues of dying – and living.
‘One of the most ingenious things in the book is the ‘Emotional Will’ tucked into the back cover,’ says Jane Tewson. ‘It asks you to write down non-material things – like a family recipe – that you might want to pass on to family members. Or things that you may be too shy – or too afraid – to say to people that you care about, but that you want to pass on. But of course the real idea behind it is to give us courage to communicate more deeply with each other, face to face, while we can.’
Dying to Know – bringing death to life published by Hardie Grant Books at £9.99 is available in the Quaker Centre Bookshop.
