DEATH OF AN ORDINARY MAN, by Sarah Perry
“Death of an Ordinary Man” is not a remarkable story. It centers on the author’s father-in-law, David: a chemist, a loving if undemonstrative father, a caring husband, a solver of Sudoku puzzles, a careful collector of stamps.
Soon after we are first introduced to him, he is diagnosed with esophageal cancer. And nine days after that, he dies, at 77, in his bungalow in Norwich, England.
What is remarkable is this book. As Kafka once wrote, “a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.” This book, and this author, are that ax.
All the things people ordinarily don’t write about compose the narrative: incontinence, confusion, loss of appetite, good and bad medical people, the search for treatment and comfort, the pointless paperwork and failures and indifference, and the occasional, almost shocking, kindnesses.
The prose dips into poetry through the repetition of the details; Sarah Perry, a best-selling novelist, describes red geraniums, endless cups of tea, endearing (but not irresistible) dogs. If you prefer books of high drama, or thickly brocaded sentences, or lashings of irony, or heart-rending monologues revealing all, this is not the book for you.
Instead, Perry turns this quick and intimate journey into the book’s heart, rendering those things that are often private public, without trampling on anyone and without self-satisfaction.
This is not a book about grief, although the author and her husband, David’s son, are indeed grieving. Rather, this is a steadily building, attentive and human account of death, for this particular family, over the course of nine days.
And, as much as a portrait of David, this is an account — without apology and with a bit of British starch and reticence — of Perry’s own reckoning with the act, both public and private, of dying.
“It is the night of Nov. 15, 2022. It is one day since David was given his diagnosis; it is eight days until he will die,” Perry writes. “David is sleeping, curled like a child on his side. The red numbers on the alarm clock tick silently over; now it is the morning of Nov. 16 and seven days until he will die. When the sun comes up it will appear there are more and more flowers on the almond tree but the geraniums are on their way out.”
It will turn out that the geraniums are not dying; they will keep blooming and dropping red petals, like the numbers clicking over on David’s digital bedside clock; akin to the wild almond tree, visible from the house.
All of this is of a piece with the silly, likable parrots on the wallpaper in David’s bungalow and the biscuits and cups of tea that the family consumes. And I have developed such an affection for these Wagon Wheels — a snack made of two crunchy biscuits filled with marshmallow, and sometimes raspberry jam, and covered in a chocolate-like coating — that a house without them seems to me, at the very least, unprepared and even unwelcoming.
“This is not to say that in the days following I was always competent and cheerful and kind,” she writes. “Over and over I failed to be any of these things, and was often exhausted and resentful and desperately sad. What I mean is that my resentment and sorrow seemed unremarkable, because they were part of my condition in being alive.”
Perry is not easy on herself, nor is she self-flagellating. The same ostensibly cool, deeply warm and human eye she casts on all that is inanimate, she casts on herself and her family.
Perry’s entire point is that this condition of being alive includes, inevitably and properly, the process of dying. One of her responses to the situation is to become fascinated by a magnificent blue silk opera coat with big sleeves and a high collar — and her wish to distract herself with finding and purchasing the coat is as human, and understandable, as any other moment. I rooted for the coat and the pleasure it might give her; the coveting and purchasing of the magnificent, far-from-everyday garment is as moving as the weakening of David’s body and the steady kindness of the night nurse.
There are no celestial visits, no astonishing visions, no shocking reconciliations. Even Perry’s epiphanies (“I am astonished to find I am not sadder now than I was before,” or “My faith waxes and wanes: I am no wiser than I ever was, it is only that I’ve seen more than I’d ever seen”) are spare and elegant.
Much is laid before us, with great precision: finely tuned metaphors, graceful repetitions. Facts are faced, faults are noted, death and life are seen and held. That is all — and that is truly plenty, this valuable and beautiful account a gift to the reader, grieving or not.
I found myself thinking of a line in Jane Hirshfield’s “Poem With Two Endings”:
“Death is voracious, it swallows all the living./Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.”
DEATH OF AN ORDINARY MAN | By Sarah Perry | Mariner | 208 pp. | $28
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