The Household Guide To Dying

Call me perverse, or maybe masochistic, but back in mid-March I signed up for a Mother Talk book tour, for a book called The Household Guide to Dying. Given that my mother was in the process of dying, and did so before I finished the book, it was a rather odd and slightly unsettling reading experience.

The book is not without its charms. It's a first person fiction narrative, written from the point of view of a woman who's wrapping up the bits and pieces of her life, as she prepares to die of cancer. Delia Bennet is a snarky advice columnist, with two school-aged girls and a husband who decorate her coffin for her as it sits in the middle of the living room. She spends days making lists for her daughters' far-in-the-future weddings, filling the freezer with homemade food for her family to eat after her demise, exacting revenge upon a cranky neighbor with a perfect lawn, and creating memory boxes for the girls. She contemplates making blood sausage with her own blood, as a way to live on in her loved ones - but (thankfully!) chooses not to. And she works on her final book, the last in a series of Household Guides, this one to be The Household Guide to Dying.

Threaded throughout are references to the inimitable Mrs. Beeton (and her Book of Household Management, the seminal household guide), as well as to Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (Bennet, get it?).

The core of the book is Delia's journey back to a town where she'd lived long ago - a journey she undertakes because she's looking for someone. It devolves that she'd had a child who died at eight, whose heart was transplanted into a girl with a congenital heart defect, and she's looking for the girl. In the end, she doesn't find the girl, but the girl later finds her. And so, everything gets wrapped up with a bow and she gets to die with all of her chickens in a row.

I found the the narrative all well and good, but it's the little bits in the interstices that kind of enchanted me, like this:

What are the cockles of the heart anyway? The oddest thoughts come to you when you're standing at a graveside. And at a graveside a dictionary is probably the last thing you have to hand. I knew all about the heart, but when I got home I would have to look up the cockles.*

Many chapters begin with a question/answer from her advice column, or a paragraph from her forthcoming book. There's great music referenced throughout, interesting sounding plant matter (native to Australia, I guess), and chickens in her backyard.

Somehow - despite the illness and impending death of the protagonist, the book manages to be clever, comic and moving.

It ends, as it must, with Delia narrating her own death.

I imagined dying to be similar to leaving them at the school gate on the first day, knowing you have to go, you want to go, but every muscle screaming as much as them to stay, every cell clawing you back. But no, now I'm feeling it for the first and last time in my life, I discover it isn't like that at all. I am calm. I feel no pain. I watch them coming and going and my heart could not be fuller with them, but I experience total freedom. My family. It seems to be an ending yet not a goodbye. I seem to be leaving them for something much better, though I can't have loved them more. Although I want them, I can let them go. Such splendid poetic ambiguity. I thought I was right before this and now I know it for certain. Death is a poetic moment.

I guess it can be. It's hard to read that penultimate paragraph without wondering what was going through my mother's head as she took her last breaths. I hope it was poetic.


*And rather than running to the dictionary to look up cockles, I went back to Niobe.