Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

Arthur recalls in her elegant debut memoir how she became a death doula, providing emotional support and guidance to those who are nearing death. Eight years into a dissatisfying law career, Arthur was depressed, unmoored, and sure she’d “fumbled my way into a life I despised.” On a trip to Cuba in search of answers, she had a transformative encounter with a woman suffering from uterine cancer; when she asked how the woman felt about the possibility of dying and learned no one had posed such a question before, Arthur knew she’d stumbled into her life’s calling: “It breaks my heart that Jessica is dancing alone with death. I feel called to dance with her in that lonely place.” Interweaving the account of her journey to becoming a death doula with digressions into her legal career, romantic relationships, bouts of depression, and childhood memories of fleeing Ghana with her family in the 1980s, Arthur poignantly recalls how her clients prepared for death, whether in quiet privacy or surrounded by music, art, and friends, “in full surrender, grateful for the gift to have been... human.” Taken together, these stories portray death as simultaneously personal, universal, and unknowable, a complexity that Arthur acknowledges with consummate respect: “No certainty exists in the practice of death companioning.... The best I can do is be there with [the dying] as they try to create answers for themselves.” Readers of Caitlin Doughty and Lori Gottlieb will be fascinated. (Apr.)