Brice Montgomery's Reviews > Getting to Know Death: A Meditation

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the ARC!

Getting to Know Death is a muted but mesmerizing reflection on the final years of a life.

The book is characterized by a kind of good-humored grief as Gail Godwin recounts the many frustrations of aging—a mind that can outpace the body, the people around her recognizing her age before she can, a body that speaks for itself when she would rather it didn’t. She never shies away from the grim reality of nearing death, and the tone remains subdued. Even so, the book itself is never grim because Godwin refuses to leave the moment she is in. There are many reflections on the past, but they serve only to deepen her occupancy in the present.

The author entertains the anxieties of mortality, allowing them to interrupt narrative flow in much the same way that your grandparents talk about their friends dying, but she always anchors these sections to the significance of the grief. It’s hard enough to live—even harder to keep living without others, as so much of a person’s selfhood is defined by their relationships. Throughout the book, Godwin keeps a running list of everyone she outlives. We see her name alongside those of her friends, paired with birth and death dates, Godwin remaining an unclosed bracket.

As such, Getting to Know Death is primarily concerned with this: What does it mean for a life to be open-ended when time is no longer in front of it? It’s an unanswerable yet unavoidable question, and Godwin graciously invites readers into her journey deep into its center.