Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love

Description

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn's dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her. Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark's wife of 33 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer. It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn's letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death. Paradoxically, her dying brings the couple back to the intensity of their first love. In the tradition of Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Cory Taylor's remarkable memoir, Dying, Mark Baker's Thirty Days is an inspirational book about death and dying.

Mark Raphael Baker is the author of The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory, a best-selling and seminal book on his parents' experience during the Holocaust which won a NSW Premier's Literary Award. He is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

'During his first thirty days of mourning, Mark Baker wrote about his wife Kerryn Baker, who lived an "ordinary" life, as most of us do, but who was extraordinary in the courage, dignity, and above all, the gentle, wise grace of her dying. Few of us will be able to die so well, but every reader of this book will be inspired to do so. Baker recalls their life together and writes of Kerryn's death and dying in many tones-lyrically, tenderly, with self-deprecating irony, embarrassed candour and more-but one hears in them all pain so raw and need so desperate that it sometimes threatened to unhinge him. He writes of love and grief with power that brings back to our hearts knowledge that is too often only in our heads-that the disappearance of a human personality will forever be mysterious to us because every human being is irreplaceable.' -- Raimond Gaita 'A lament, a wail, a raw confession of suffering and regret, but most of all, of love.' -- Ramona Koval 'Piercing, unsparing, and sweet, this book will break your heart and put it back together again.' -- Miranda Richmond Mouillot, author of A Fifty-year Silence A courageous and intimate portrait of a marriage that will leave you devastated, enriched, irrevocably altered.' -- Emily Bitto 'Thirty Days is more than a cancer memoir, it is a searching, courageous, intensely intimate portrait of a marriage, a family, a beloved woman, a man wild with loss. Baker addresses the reader with searing honesty from the very heart of grief. His testimony will leave you devastated, enriched, irrevocably altered.' -- Emily Bitto