How detailed is the image of you on your deathbed?
Alua Arthur has hers planned right down to the scent of the trees and the incense she’ll breathe, the sound of tumbling water in a creek that she’ll hear and the last words she’ll utter – and they aren’t G-rated!
Arthur’s deathbed plans are especially vivid because, as a death doula, she helps to ease her clients’ passage from life to death. Naturally, she’s given a lot of thought to her own.
Arthur writes in her new book: “All life eventually needs relief from the intricacy of living. Nature does what nature does. It has since time immemorial. Nobody gets out alive.”
But her book is not just about the end, hers and yours. It’s a rich exploration of what brought Arthur to this work.
Of getting a law degree and quickly realizing she wanted to do anything but practice law.
Traveling further and further afield, anywhere to quell her boredom and restlessness.
Being Black in a field that remains predominantly white. And learning to honor what the dying person wants.
In “Briefly, Perfectly Human” she writes: “It’s important not to conflate others’ experience with your own because then we give them what we would want, rather than what they need.”
Join Kerri Miller at a special on-the-road edition of Talking Volumes. She’ll be at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on June 4 to talk with Minnesotan Leif Enger about his new book, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Tickets are limited. Learn more at mprevents.org.
Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe. But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both.
This week’s recommendation comes from Carrie Koepke of Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Mo. She suggests the nonfiction book “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance” by Dan Egan. ”
In her debut novel taking place in the Victorian era, Kuchenga Shenjé explores the expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized.
In a heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, “Brooklyn,” Colm Tóibín handles uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging through time to a devastating climax.
