An old man learns how to die from a younger woman facing death

For the entire six months that Mark Dowie became friends with Judith Tannenbaum, they both knew she was going to die. In fact for most of that time they knew the exact hour she would go ... sometime between 11:00 AM and noon, December 5, 2019, which she did.

They talked about many things during those months, but the rapidly approaching moment of Judith?s death came to inform and shape their entire conversation. Death was, as she said, ?the undercurrent and the overstory of our relationship? ... one of the deepest, most profound and fulfilling of Mark?s life.

This book is ultimately about the lost human art of releasing everything that matters to the living in preparation for the inevitable. It is a rare lesson offered by a poet who somehow taught herself, and then the author, how to let go.