On November 23, 2022, 77-year-old retired chemist David Perry died in a hospital bed installed in his bungalow in Norwich, England, nine days after receiving a diagnosis of metastatic esophageal cancer. Death of an Ordinary Man is his daughter-in-law novelist Sarah Perry's frank, compassionate account of those final days, her first work of nonfiction and a moving meditation on death and life.
Perry (The Essex Serpent; Melmoth) wastes no time setting the stage for David's demise. She describes an afternoon tea date at which she waited with her husband, Robert, David's only child. She observed, as David approached, that "there was death in his gait, in his grim and concentrated stare, in the dense grey pallor on his cheek." He was "more or less a dead man," she concluded. David's feeling "in a muddle" and difficulty swallowing soon led to a blood test, an endoscopy, and a biopsy that confirmed advanced cancer, a diagnosis that her self-effacing father-in-law accepted with equanimity.
David spent much of his married life caring for a wife disabled by rheumatoid arthritis; she predeceased him by 10 years. He enjoyed stamp collecting, sudoku, and gardening, and was a faithful parishioner at his local Baptist church. But it immediately became clear to Perry and Robert that his precipitous decline would rob him irrevocably of those modest pleasures. Even as Perry bluntly confessed her fear that she wouldn't be up to the demands of caregiving, she and Robert proved more than equal to that challenge. They also had the aid of National Health Service doctors and hospice caregivers, who occasionally became the targets of her anger and frustration, but who, for the most part, performed their jobs with competence, empathy, and grace.
Perry's writing has an unassuming lyricism that makes even the hardest moments of this story resonate. Her expertly modulated prose mirrors the compression of David's final days. Most striking are a collection of recurring images--red geraniums that improbably flowered well into the fall, the red numbers on the clock radio in David's bedroom, and parrots on the wallpaper--that take on a revelatory quality and serve as reminders that life persists even in the face of impending death.
Perry's opportunity to be intimate with David's dying brings with it not merely a deeper understanding of death but an appreciation of the preciousness of the life that precedes it: "Now I understand there are no ordinary lives--that every death is the end of a single event in time's history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular." Death of an Ordinary Man is not an easy book, but it's an undeniably important one: brave, candid, and above all, painfully beautiful. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Sarah Perry's first full-length nonfiction work recounts her father-in-law's final days and movingly explores the border between life and death.