Category: Books

Save What’s Left, by Elizabeth Castellano (Anchor, 304 pages)

When Kathleen Deane’s cardiologist husband of 30 years decides to move out because of a “paradigm shift,” she experiences her own.

She decides to move from the suburbs of Kansas City to a New York beach town where a childhood friend is happily ensconced on a 50-acre potato farm, “unironically wearing overalls and aprons” and painting everything that doesn’t move white. Ten years near the sea have made this formerly free spirit of a friend “downright wholesome.” And Kathleen is convinced that by moving there, she, too, will find the sort of bliss her husband thinks he will find on a ’round-the-world cruise and then living in an RV.

What she finds, however, is a McMansion under construction next to the ocean-view shack that she purchased on the recommendation of a real-estate agent. And a life that is not quite what she envisioned.

This is not a tragedy, however, but pure comedy, a book-length stand-up routine with a punchline every few minutes. It’s Elizabeth Castellano’s comic distillation of her life growing up in a beach town on a peninsula in New York’s Suffolk County, where, as in the novel, development threatens to swallow much of the town’s character and charm.

In Save What’s Left, the fictional town is called Whitbey, and Kathleen is unwittingly absorbed into its drama when she buys a “Save What’s Left” bumper sticker at a local shop without knowing what it really means, and donates to a “community fund” that is funding something quite the opposite of what she imagined.

Whitbey is beautiful, as promised, but upon close inspection, there is much drama seething among the locals, making the hostilities of a typical suburban HOA seem docile by comparison.

The instigators seem to be a group of women known as the “Bay Mission,” who walk by Kathleen’s house every morning at exactly 7:16, so strict is their routine. When Kathleen gets on their mailing list, she deems the group something of a cult, despite its benign activities such as cleaning up the beach and creating a community zen garden. Every time Kathleen gets an email from the group, she says, “I half expect it to include a recipe for turning all the children of Whitbey into mice.”

But Kathleen herself is turning into a different person than she was when she arrived in Whitbey. Having tired of collecting orange jingle shells on the beach, she has turned her energies to questioning the legality of the ever-growing house under construction next to hers, which is constantly raining debris in her yard. She throws herself into anti-McMansion advocacy, writing a column for the local paper (that is hilariously rewritten by the editor) and showing up at every town council meeting, aided by a local man who had no interest in her cause but apparently wanted to be on television and likes the attention.

Meanwhile, Kathleen’s husband, who had been sending her postcards and gifts during his paradigm-changing trip around the world, turns up unexpectedly in an Airstream, with nowhere else to go.

Kathleen, who had said of her husband, “I don’t want to sound unkind, but, if a man leaves you in search of adventure, you want that man to choke to death on a deep-fried cricket in Beijing. You just do,” isn’t happy about this but allows him to camp in the driveway and use her electricity, not unlike the Griswold family’s Cousin Eddie. (It is, Kathleen reflects, the secret to a good marriage or a good divorce: “Someone needs to live in the driveway.”) Soon after, the monstrosity next door is finally finished and shows up on AirBnB as “Seaside Retreat. Modern Wonder.” (It has, after all, “four outdoor showers, five bathrooms, two washing machines, two full kitchens, and a waterfall.”)

At times the hijinks threaten to devolve into National Lampoon-style slapstick, but Castellano set out to write an anti-beach read, meaning one that slyly makes fun of typical beach reads while exaggerating the foibles of beach town life. She does this spectacularly. She also is a master of hilarious apropos-of-nothing asides, such as a running storyline about a Christmas card and letter that Kathleen and her family gets every year from someone they don’t know. (After her husband left, Kathleen was quick to send the letter-writer a card with her new address so that she gets the future Christmas cards in the divorce.)

Save What’s Left is a romp in the sun and sand, albeit without the physical irritants of sun and sand. It’s all fun, especially if you’ve ever loved a beach town, or thought about moving to one. And in that case, it’s also a warning.

As Kathleen says in the opening of the book: “I’m now the kind of horrible person who genuinely cares about what so-and-so had to say about the traffic from the chowder festival. I’m the kind of person who has an opinion about whether the beach sticker should be placed on the front or rear bumper of the car. I know more than one person named Bunny. … I’m that kind of person. The worst kind of person. I’m a beach person.” A

The Heat Will Kill You First, by Jeff Goodell (Little, Brown and Co., 385 pages )

The effects of a warming planet seem less obvious in New England than in, say, Phoenix, Arizona, where it is 115 degrees Fahrenheit as I write. Except, of course, for the recently flooded towns in Vermont. And the hazy smoke that keeps drifting down here from Canada.

We can argue until the cows come home about whether we sit on the precipice of weather-driven, man-made calamity, but Jeff Goodell’s mind is made up. Heat, he says, is “an extinction force that takes the universe back to its messy beginnings. Before there was light, there was heat. It is the origin of all things and the end of all things.” And he is 100 percent certain about what is driving recent extreme weather: “250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide.”

Goodell is a journalist who has been writing about climate for more than a decade. The cover of his 2017 book The Water Will Come looks like a still from a dystopian movie, with a trio of skyscrapers nearly submerged in seawater. Now Goodell is back with the equally alarming title The Heat Will Kill You First. His timing is impeccable.

Smart people on either side of the debate can disagree about whether recent record-setting heat waves are blips in time or a uniquely dangerous threat to humankind. But there’s no disputing that Goodell is an engaging writer at the top of his game. He’s like the love child of Ed Yong and James Patterson, with a little bit of Rachel Carson thrown in, which is to say he writes science-based, dystopian thrillers.

He acknowledges that small changes in global temperatures in recent centuries (overall, we’re up 2.2 degrees) don’t seem particularly scary. “Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day?” he asks. … “Even the phrase ‘global warming’ sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.”

But heat is deadlier than most of us think, he says. The human body is generally a well-regulated heat-generating machine, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of excess heat to kill us. Internally, there’s less than 10 degrees difference between our normal, everything’s-fine temperature of 98 degrees and the catastrophic cell death and organ failure that can occur at 107 degrees. And tragically, we get new examples of this almost every year when another fit athlete dies from heat stroke that occurs during a run or a football practice.

To drive this point home, Goodell recounts the story of the California couple who died with their baby and dog on an otherwise unremarkable day hike close to their home. The deaths, which made national news because they were originally so puzzling, were eventually determined to be from hyperthermia and dehydration. It had been in the 70s when they started the hike going downhill, but temperatures exceeded 100 on their way back up, and all appeared to have died of heat stroke.

“Just being alive generates heat. But if your body gets too hot too fast — it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever — you are in big trouble,” he writes. As our internal temperature rises past 103 degrees, blood pressure falls and people pass out. Interestingly, “This is in fact an involuntary survival mechanism, a way for your brain to get your body horizontal and get some blood to your head. At this point, if you get help and can cool down quickly, you can recover with little permanent damage.” But if you fall in a hot place and there is no one to help, you may never wake up.

Of course, people freeze to death when they fall unintended in cold places; falling and extreme temperatures are bad generally. But heat, Goodell says, is an “extinction force” and “the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible force that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture out of trees until they are ready to ignite. It revs up the bugs that eat the crops and thaws the permafrost that contains bacteria from the last ice age.” The next pandemic, he predicts, may come from some recently thawed ancient bacteria.

It’s not just humans at risk in extremely hot temperatures; others struggle in ways we normally wouldn’t think about. In the heat wave that hit Portland in 2021, for example, people were finding an unusually high number of injured baby birds on the ground. They weren’t dehydrated. They were leaving their hot, crowded nests before they were old enough to fly. And yes, dogs pant in heat since they can’t sweat like humans or plants, but some dogs fare better in heat than others, and not just because of differences in their fur. “Dogs with flat faces and wide skulls, such as English bulldogs, are twice as likely to succumb to heat as beagles, border collies and other breeds with more pronounced snouts.”

There is hardly a page without an odd, memorable fact like that, and a beautifully crafted paragraph that, as an added bonus, kindles a vapor of fear. Goodell, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, is a pro at the dialogue-rich narrative style that keeps readers turning pages. Also, he’s really, really worried about us. From the sea creatures dying in warming oceans to deliverymen and farm workers passing out from heat stroke, he sounds the alarm on every page: you don’t know what is coming, you don’t know what is here.

In air-conditioned offices and homes, it can seem a bit overwrought, but, as he points out, there is a big divide between “the cool and the damned.” The affluent have central air conditioning while the poor swelter in homes without AC, or with old, inefficient units they can hardly afford to turn on. The disparity is worse in poorer countries. “Two hundred and twenty million people live in Pakistan, but there are fewer than a million air conditioners in the country,” Goodell writes. Economic inequality will be manifest in a “thermal gap,” he said, in which some people will fare better than others.

Goodell seems doubtful that things will improve; he notes that, were carbon emissions to cease today, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but also acknowledges that human beings are adaptable and are already coming up with new ways to live; some cities, for example, are painting streets white to deflect heat. In other words, most of us can probably survive this — if the heat doesn’t kill us first. A

The Last Ranger, by Peter Heller (Knopf, 304 pages)

Yellowstone National Park is having a moment. An hour, really.

The first national park in the U.S., it was established in 1872 and straddles Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It is one of the nation’s most popular tourist destinations and a plot device in the popular Paramount TV series. Its popularity derives not just from its natural beauty, but also from its wildlife, which includes bison, bears and wolves — the latter of which were reintroduced into the park nearly 20 years after they’d disappeared from the region a century earlier.

Human interference in the lives of wolves was the topic of Erica Berry’s memoir Wolfish (Flatiron), published earlier this year. Now Peter Heller addresses the topic in The Last Ranger, the latest in his growing compendium of novels that involve the outdoors, an interest he developed while growing up in Vermont and matriculating at Dartmouth.

Ren Hopper is a National Park Service ranger stationed at Yellowstone. It is a career best suited for solitary sorts, as much of the human interaction is observation, save encounters with the dumb or malevolent tourists, of which Ren seems to encounter more than his share. The dumb ones endanger themselves; the malevolent ones endanger the animals, by poaching. (Grizzly bears most often make the news when they kill someone, but more often it seems that humans try to kill them; their parts, especially the gallbladder, are components in traditional Chinese medicine.)

The story of how Ren, a fan of Russian fiction and specialty coffee drinks, came to live in a rangers’ cabin deep in the woods unfolds slowly. He learned to fish and love the outdoors under the tutelage of his mother, who drank to excess and left the family suddenly for murky reasons. He was married once, to a woman he deeply loved, but she died; why and how is initially unclear.

Ren’s best friend, besides trout, is a biologist named Hilly who studies wolves. She also lives in Yellowstone, where she is so entrenched with the packs that they know her scent and pay her little attention, as they live out their lives.

One of the more fascinating revelations of The Last Ranger is how keenly aware animals are of a human presence — some can smell us from nearly 2 miles away, and the more intelligent seem to sometimes leave their young within sight of wildlife-seeking tourists, knowing that they will be safe from predators for a short time. It’s like they’re getting some “me-time” with human babysitters, Heller writes. The novel is deeply researched, and some passages stumble into the realm of nonfiction when it comes to describing Yellowstone and its denizens.

But every good story needs a villain, and wolves are not it. The first antagonist is a surly local named Les Ingraham, whom Ren meets while fishing on his day off. To Ren, Ingraham is clearly breaking the law by pursuing a young bear with a dog. But he can’t do anything about it; he is out of uniform, and Ingraham, who is smart, has a story: his dog had been on leash but got away from him, and he was simply trying to reclaim his wayward dog.

Ren doesn’t believe him; Ingraham, like many locals, appears resentful that Yellowstone even exists and that the federal government enforces protection to animals and to the land. In particular, he seems to nurse a grudge for Hilly. And so when Hilly later gets caught in a leg trap near one of her observation points and nearly dies, Ingraham is a natural suspect, especially since he was arrested for assault 17 years earlier.

But as Ren researches Ingraham’s past, he learns that this seemingly malevolent poacher was a high school and college football star celebrated for an act of selfless heroism before he broke his back during a game. Rather than being a black-and-white suspect, Ingraham is now a puzzle to be figured out. At the same time, he learns about the existence of a group of wealthy ranchers called the Pathfinders, who had sued the federal government for stripping them of what they claim were historical rights to hunting and allowing their animals to graze on what was now park land.

Are the Pathfinders also more complicated than they seem, like Ingraham, or were they responsible for not only the trap that nearly killed Hilly and other seemingly taunting traps set around the park?

From the start, Heller’s sympathies clearly favor animals over people; like Hilly, who once made a vow to defend creatures who have no voice in the human world, he sees the worst things humans do as more reprehensible than the worst things animals do.

As Hilly says at one point, “If the earth were a meritocracy and we were graded on how much each species contributed to the well-being of the whole, we’d be [expletive]. God will blow the whistle at all the people and yell, Everybody out of the pool! It’s why Paul Watson, the Sea Shepherd captain, once said that the life of a worm is worth more than the life of a man. Sounds nuts, but it’s something to think about.”

As a writer, Heller has copious gifts of description. At one point, he describes the sounds of a wolf like this: “Two barks testing the night. Almost like a tuning, the confirming plucks of a string. And then a rising resonant howl that froze the stars in place, and dropped and hollowed like a woodwind, and then crescendoed again.”

He gives a character the habit of pinching the brim of his baseball cap as if to ward off bad luck. “It was like a rosary he wore on his head,” he writes.

But Heller’s novels are reliably gripping because they thrum quietly with tension, while slowly revealing the essence of characters who will stay with you for years. The Last Ranger, while not as good as Heller’s 2012 debut novel The Dog Stars — it’s a bit more predictable in places — is an excellent companion for the dog days of summer, especially for anyone who is more comfortable outside than in. A

After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley (Knopf, 240 pages)

The essayist Lorrie Moore once said that a short story is a love affair, compared to a novel, which is more like a marriage. That’s one way to put it. I’ve always thought of short stories as an amputation, with some vital part of the tale rudely cut off just as it’s getting good. If I’m invested in a character enough to read 5,000 words, I’d appreciate another 70,000 or so.

That said, contemporary short stories are perfect for summer reading, when the attention span is as short as the days are long. And if you can forgive her the depressing title, the new collection by acclaimed British novelist Tessa Hadley provides a summer smorgasbord of family drama that might be comically or tragically familiar.

Many of these pieces have been published in The New Yorker, including one of the best, “The Bunty Club,” which revolves around three middle-aged sisters who have returned to their childhood home as their mother lies near death in the hospital.

Hadley’s imagery is lush. She writes of one sister, getting into bed mid-afternoon to read a George Elliot novel: “She couldn’t remember the last time she had laid down to read during the day — it was like being a teenager, time stretching out voluptuously in all directions.”

On a man and a woman interacting in a cafe: “[She] felt the old tide of flirtation rising between them, promising to lift her from where she was stranded.”

Here’s how she describes one sister: “She had an aura that was just as significant as if she were a celebrity, improbably washed up at the seaside, having shaken off her entourage of admirers or detractors, thirsting to be left alone with her luxuriant inner life.”

“The Bunty Club” was the secret society the sisters had in their childhood when they met in a shed and swore to each other “not to do good and never to help people.” It was in danger of being forgotten forever until one sister came across an old box with their meeting minutes (they were exceptionally organized as girls), badges and “lists of enemies and bad deeds.” Again, I would gladly read 60,000 on that.

The other stories in the collection follow the pattern of familial angst and intimacy, often in the context of ineffectual men and mothers.

In “My Mother’s Wedding,” the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother, who is about to marry a much younger man she met “when both reached for a paper sack of muesli base at the same time” at a natural food store. An intellectual who had “never properly come up against life in its full form before,” the groom-to-be seems as uncertain about the wedding as the bride’s daughters, who have their own ways of coping (or not) with their mother’s unconventional lifestyle.

In the titular story, a family that is basically run by two precocious girls deals with the death of the father, an airline pilot who hadn’t been all that involved in their lives. In “Funny Little Snake,” a stepmother unhappily tasked with returning a child to her mother is forced to rethink the reality of her own marriage and choices.

Hadley has a gift for parsing the difficulties of family life, particularly that of adult children and aging parents. In “Coda,” set in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the narrator explains that when temporarily living with her elderly mother, she shuns the handicapped-accessible bathroom downstairs in part because of the irrational sense that “if I used it, I’d be contaminated with suffering, with old age.” She goes on, “The truth was that every so often I just needed to be alone for a few minutes, not making any effort, or being filled up with anyone else’s idea of what I was.”

In this story, as in several others, the narrator has grown up relatively plain in the shadow of a beautiful mother. Also as in others, the narrator is a sophisticated reader: “For the moment, Madame Bovary was my inner life, stirred like rich jam into the blandness of my days.”

The 12 stories in this collection are achingly beautiful at times, and painful in places. Like much contemporary short fiction, a few may leave readers scratching their heads over the conclusion, or wishing for CliffsNotes, and readers unfamiliar with the U.K. may not recognize the places Hadley writes about. But women, in particular, will recognize the family dynamics for sure. A

Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper (Random House, 282 pages)

“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one’s clothes in public” is how Christian Cooper begins his acknowledgments, wherein he thanks everyone who made his memoir possible, with one extremely notable exception: the Central Park “Karen” who vaulted him to fame.

Cooper is the bird enthusiast who was out early on Memorial Day 2020 looking at birds when an unleashed dog came running in his direction. He politely asked the dog’s owner to leash her dog, as the law requires in the part of the park called the Ramble. When she said she wouldn’t — that her dog needed exercise — he started filming their exchange, which later went viral because the woman called the police, falsely reporting that Cooper, who is Black, was threatening her.

The incident was bad enough on its own, but was magnified because of something else that happened that day — the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And within days Cooper had become something of a folk hero, an example of the ordinary dangers of being Black while driving, while jogging, while birding or doing any number of ordinary activities. He became famous while the dog walker, Amy Cooper, became infamous. And he has leveraged that fame into an enchanting memoir that has surprisingly little to do with what happened that day, but instead is an ode to the natural world and an account of growing up Black, gay and intellectual in 1970s America.

The first sign of how well-crafted this memoir is comes in the first chapter, “An Incident in Central Park.” He describes running through the park alone and says, “I know what this looks like.”

“My sneakers are old and muddy, my jeans in need of a good washing, and my shirt, though collared, could at best be described as unkempt. I am a Black man on the run. And I have binoculars.” As it turns out, the “incident” is not what we think, but something entirely different, related to birding. It is a smart, charming entry into Cooper’s story, which has a mystery at its heart: How, exactly, does an otherwise normal person get so rabidly obsessed with birds?

In Cooper’s case, birds were, like science fiction and comic books, a mental sanctuary as he was growing up on Long Island in a lower-middle class family where intellectual pursuits were prized. When he was 9 he attended a summer woodworking class, where he was given a choice of making a footstool or a bird feeder. He picked the bird feeder, and the first bird to come to that feeder, a red-winged blackbird, became his “spark bird,” the creature that began his birding obsession.

After carefully navigating high school while keeping his sexuality secret, Cooper went to Harvard on a scholarship, where he finally was able to come out as gay. (When he told his father, the father asked if he wanted to see a psychiatrist, he said.) But it wasn’t until he spent time in South America, on a post-graduation fellowship funded by Harvard, that he really began to embrace his sexuality and see that being a Black man in other countries was a vastly different experience from being a Black man in America. “In Buenos Aires,” he writes, “I had found myself in a city full of white folks who desire me because of my Blackness, not in spite of it. … I’d spent my whole life being told that as Black person I was not quite as worthy as a white person, and on an unconscious level, I had internalized that proposition.”

Even then, there were the birds, and Cooper writes beautifully about their migrations, their habitats and his searches for them, from the Blackburnian warbler to the alarmingly named Ovenbird. This man is really, really into birds, and he wants us all to be. While the narrative meanders through Cooper’s work and relationships, it is interspersed with birding tips and interludes about the “pleasures of birding” — for example, “the joy of hunting, without the bloodshed.”

Eventually he returns to the other “incident in Central Park” and offers a much fuller understanding of what happened that day.

To his everlasting credit, Cooper has been remarkably chill about the exchange that enraged millions of Americans and effectively canceled the dog walker for life. He wasn’t even responsible for the video going viral; he had shared it with a small group of friends on Facebook, where he normally shared what notable bird he had just sighted, and his sister asked permission to post it on Twitter. He agreed — “after all, how much attention could it get?”

The tweet landed in the feed of comedian Kathy Griffin, who retweeted it, and within hours the media were calling. (Interestingly, he found out about the George Floyd video during an interview with “Inside Edition.”)

Although Cooper was pressured by the district attorney’s office, and many people in the public, he declined to participate in any charges related to the incident. He said what the dog walker did and said was “incredibly racist” but passes no judgment on Amy Cooper herself. But he has also made clear that he had no interest in any sort of kumbaya-esque reunion with her and says she never reached out to him personally to apologize for that day. “It’s not about Amy Cooper,” he writes. “What’s important is what her actions revealed: how deeply and widely racial bias runs in the United States. (Ironically, she was born in Canada, yet she still tapped into that dark vein that carries its poison to every part of this land.)”

Fame that erupts on social media is often fleeting and unearned. Christian Cooper is the rare exception — his is a story worth telling, and in this memoir he does so exceptionally well. A

The In-Between, by Hadley Vlahos (Ballantine, 259 pages)

For much of the past 50 years, most Americans died in a hospital. That was a change from the first part of the 20th century, when most people died at home. Since 2017, more people are dying at home again, in large part because of the expansion of hospice care.

Hospice provides in-home support for a dying person and their caregivers, administering pain medication to the patient and providing other services. A new memoir from a hospice nurse provides a surprisingly upbeat look into hospice care and what people can expect at the end of life.

Hadley Vlahos was a single mom in her early 20s when she became a registered nurse, and then began working in hospice. She looked so young that families sometimes mistook her for a nurse’s assistant (and in one funny case, a stripper), but her youthfulness was also an asset, as when a dying man decided his new purpose in life was teaching this young woman everything she didn’t know about sports and current events.

But the main thing that Vlahos learned from her patients is that there is a liminal state between being alive and being dead, a state she calls “the in-between.” Her memoir is built around a series of stories about what past patients experienced during this time, from seemingly interacting with long-dead relatives to having a premonition about a future event.

She tells these stories matter-of-factly; there is no mysticism or religious proselytizing in the book; in fact, Vlahos was raised in a religious home, but turned away from her childhood faith after the death of a friend. And she doesn’t speculate on anything that happens after she pronounces the time of death of the patient aloud (which is part of her job). She is simply relating the “in-between” experiences of dying people, to which her work makes her a witness. And those experiences are, put simply, rather riveting.

There was, for example, Carl, a bed-ridden patient whom one day Vllahos found walking around his house with a flashlight, looking under furniture and behind curtains. When asked what he was doing, he said that he was playing hide-and-seek with Anna, his 2-year-old daughter who had drowned decades before. Vlahos, who had been trained to “meet patients where they are,” accepted this calmly.

“But where was Carl?” she wondered. “It seemed as if he was in two places at once. Physically, he was in the room with Mary and me; emotionally and mentally, he seemed very much to be somewhere else, with Anna.” Carl also said to Vlahos that he’d had a conversation with his mother. He seemed otherwise rational and consented to go back to bed.

Consulting with a physician, Vlahos learned it wasn’t unusual for dying people to have a spurt of physical energy, similar to the flash of cognition called terminal lucidity that sometimes occurs shortly before death. The phenomenon that caused Carl to get out of bed is called “the surge” by medical professionals, and it often fools family members into thinking their loved one is recovering, when actually it’s a sign that they will likely die within a few days. And indeed, Carl went downhill the next day.

This is the sort of practical information that is useful for any family considering hospice, especially since so many of us have been far removed from the physical processes of death as it was relegated to hospitals and nursing homes. But the book is also surprisingly hopeful, given that it involves the last day of the terminally ill, some of whom are dying in what should have been their prime.

There is, for example, the story of Elizabeth, a 40-year-old woman who is dying of lung cancer despite having never smoked and having no family history, and Reggie, the 58-year-old who is dying from advanced liver disease brought on by alcoholism. (Reggie’s story has additional poignancy from the reaction of his devoted dog to his death.) Elizabeth is a beautiful woman who had clearly been athletic before she got sick; in one of her conversations with Vlahos, she tells her that she regrets she had spent so much of her life working on a treadmill and confides that she avoided being with friends on her birthday because she didn’t want to eat cake. “I wish I’d just eaten the damn cake,” Elizabeth said.

Vlahos, who has struggled with disordered eating because of something her father said in her childhood, takes Elizabeth’s advice to heart. In fact it is because of the wisdom that so many of these patients impart in their final day that she sincerely enjoys her work, despite the reaction she gets from others when they learn what she does. (That revulsion clearly doesn’t carry over to the general public; she has more than a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by NurseHadley.)

The work takes Vlahos everywhere from elegant homes in beach communities to a homeless camp, and she interperses the stories of her patients with the timeline of her own life — growing up with a father who appears to have been emotionally abusive, having a child out of wedlock at age 20, finding love with a physical therapist and navigating the terminal illness of her new mother-in-law.

While her writing is best described as workmanlike — there are no soaring passages of prose — the book is memorable for the stories and the remarkable pattern of dying people reporting conversations with loved ones (who sometimes tell them — accurately, as it turns out — when they are going to pass). These experiences take place whether people are religious or staunch atheists. These are usually people on morphine, of course, and the experiences can easily be written off hallucinations or delusions caused by the medicine or the body gradually shutting down. And most of us know of the dying experiences of people who didn’t experience anything quite so dreamy.

While Vlahos (very carefully) does seem to eventually side with those who believe in an afterlife, she clearly is open to anything as an explanation for what she has witnessed. “I don’t think we can explain everything that happens here on Earth, much less after we physically leave our bodies,” she writes. The observations of the living can neither predict or confirm the experience of the dead, but this memoir offers hope that dying may not be as terrifying as many people think — at least not with hospice care. B