With the threat of death comes fear. And whether that fear is a product of religion or a fear of the unknown, or even of simple loneliness at the prospect of leaving behind all those we know and love, it is an ever-present characteristic of death. In very different ways, authors Marion Woodman and Heather Robertson deal with this notion of fear and attempt to understand death, insofar as that is possible, in their latest books, Bone: Dying into Life and Meeting Death: In Hospital, Hospice, and Home.

In Bone, Jungian analyst Woodman journeys through her own personal negotiation with the threat of death. Diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1993, she spent two years battling the disease as it spread to her bones. Bone is a journal of her experience. While the entries are peppered with quotations from authors who inspired her during this difficult time – Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, William Blake, and Italo Calvino, to name a few – Woodman’s approach is decidedly “new age” and most definitely Jungian. This may create problems for some readers. Woodman invokes Sophia, the Spiritual Warrior, and the Great Mother, never once explaining who they are, why they are important to her, or why they are appropriate in the context of cancer survival. These references might be obvious to a Jungian analyst, but will mean little to most readers.

Nevertheless, Woodman does offer some valuable insights. She talks about the evolution of her relationship with her husband, Ross, and how she rearranged the priorities in her life. In many ways, however, Woodman’s endeavour with Bone strikes one as selfish. Her exploration is mostly an inner one, offering little to others struggling with cancer.

Heather Robertson’s Meeting Death: In Hospital, Hospice, and at Home is quite the opposite. After her father’s painful death from cancer, Robertson felt compelled to understand death both as a cultural phenomenon and from a caregiving point of view. She was deeply unhappy with her father’s hospital care in the last days of his life, finding it compassionless and empty. She decided she had to find out how to deal with death both practically and emotionally. “I will search silk and string in my cultural rubble,” she writes, “and I will go to the dying and find out how they do it.”

Robertson’s is a perfect balance of memoir and fact. She opens with a gripping and compassionate account of her father’s ordeal – and her own pain in seeing him waste away. From there, she embarks on a journey of physical, spiritual, and emotional discovery. She takes a course and becomes a caregiver herself, discovering firsthand what it is like to help the dying. She visits hospices in Toronto, Manitoba, Vancouver, New Brunswick, London (England), and Uganda. She talks with the ill and their loved ones. Some of the stories she tells are harrowing: children with brain tumours dying undignified deaths, tainted blood victims, the terminally ill looking for assisted suicide – Robertson investigates them all.
She speaks with patients, families, doctors, and caregivers, and addresses corollary issues like euthanasia, the Sue Rodriguez case, the (mis)measuring and (mis)understanding of pain, the use and misuse of morphine, and the inadequacy of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Robertson is exhaustive, and her background as an English scholar is put to good use. Her writing is accessible and compelling, and she capitalizes on her vast knowledge of literary history. Victorian writer Thomas de Quincey’s opium addiction, Romantic poet John Keats’s battle with tuberculosis, Elizabethan poet John Donne’s wasting illness – these stories plus an exploration of Greek myths and Beowulf all give context and meaning to a culturally vast subject. Robertson even travels to Elvis Presley’s Graceland to understand a death mythologized by popular culture.
The mix of deep reflection and concrete research offers solid results in a volume that, if placed in the hands of caregivers, might actually help improve conditions for the dying.

While their approaches differ significantly, both Woodman and Robertson offer a similar prescription – to meet death squarely and to negotiate passage to a peaceful reconciliation with its inevitability.