Soon: Tales from Hospice - Hardcover

In the old days, a hospice was a place of rest and entertainment for pilgrims and travelers. One might think, on first consideration, that the definition has changed over the centuries, for modern hospices are a place for the dying; yet what is death but a journey, and the dying but a different set of pilgrims? In Soon: Tales from the Hospice, A.G. Mojtabai draws on her experiences as a hospice volunteer to craft a collection of stories detailing the final days of a group of terminally ill fellow travelers. In her preface, Mojtabai describes the process by which she wrote these stories:

I noticed a woman in a turban, sitting up in bed writing one letter after another. What was in them? I had to write those letters myself in order to find out.... The sight of an emaciated man in a plaid bathrobe, walking down the corridor, using his IV pole for support, conjoined with my reading of cancer diaries, set me to the writing of "Zone."

Each story has its seed in an actual experience, and from these germinal moments has sprouted a collection of stories that are sad, inspiring, moving, and even occasionally funny. If nothing else, Soon reminds the reader that life doesn't end with a terminal diagnosis, and that, strange as it may seem, the last days can be among best.

Set in a Texan hospice, award-winning novelist Mojtabai's (Called Out) collection of 17 interlocking short stories explores the ways in which patients?the cruelly young, the frail and weary, the angry, the believers, the rationalists, the people who try to maintain control, the deniers?try to find a common language with their visitors without small talk. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons attempt to bridge the barricade that fatal illness erects. A precocious eight-year-old, clearly aware of her impending death, asks a volunteer about the life span of mayflies; a courageous woman uses her final reserves of energy to write cheerful farewell letters to her friends and family; a strong-willed man refuses painkillers so he can describe his final moments with an unclouded mind. Throughout, nothing escapes Mojtabai's keen eye for the irony of life going on so near to death: a hospice worker dismantles funeral wreaths to rearrange the undamaged flowers into bouquets for the patients who are still living; a comatose patient is bathed while a man and a woman discuss sex on a nearby television. A hospice volunteer herself, Mojtabai remarks in her introduction that she began the work to "face down [her] fears" of death; in doing so she helps us face down ours.
- fears" of death; in doing so she helps us face down ours.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.