We seem to avoid thinking about mortality, or talking about loss, but it is an unavoidable fact that we all face the loss of a loved one, and will each confront that truth in different ways. If grief is unavoidable, what is the best way to make peace with it?

 

Part One of Living With Dying features Dakshana Bascaramurty in conversation with CBC’s Idill Mussa, and Anita Lahey in conversation with Ellen Chang-Richardson.

 

This is Not the End of Me by Dakshana Bascaramurty is the moving, inspiring story of a young husband and father who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-three, sets out to build a legacy for his infant son. Layton Reid was a globe-trotting, risk-taking, sunshine-addicted bachelor--then came a melanoma diagnosis. Cancer startled him out of his arrested development--he returned home to Halifax to work as a wedding photographer--and remission launched him into a new, passionate life as a husband and father-to-be. When the melanoma returned, now at Stage IV, Layton and his family put all their stock into a punishing alternative therapy, hoping for a cure. This Is Not the End of Me recounts Layton's three-year journey as he tried desperately to stay alive for his young son, Finn, and then found purpose in preparing Finn for a world without him. 

 

Equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, The Last Goldfish by Anita Lahey is a poignant memoir of youth, friendship, and the impermanence of life. Anita and Louisa, instant friends in grade nine, navigate the wilds of 1980s suburban adolescence against the backdrop of dramatic world events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. They make carpe diem their manifesto and hatch ambitious plans. But when Louisa’s life takes a shocking turn, into hospital wards, medical tests, and treatments, a new possibility confronts them, one that alters, with devastating finality, the prospect of the future for them both.

 

A limited number of signed books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.

 

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