'Now and at the Hour of Our Death' by Susana Moreira Marques

“I knock on the door of a man who knows he will die, hoping he’ll tell me how it feels to be a man who knows he will die.” For some months, Moreira Marques accompanied a palliative care team as they visited dying patients in the remote Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes (‘Behind-the-Mountains’). She recorded her observations of the experiences of the dying and the way that the ending of a life realigns that life and those around it, before and after the death occurs. Her acute sensitivities have sheered her journalism (or anthropology, really) of any excesses, and what emerges is spare, poetic and moving. Her tenderness and her unflinching eye enable her to record the raw details of dying without making the mistake of attributing death any meaning or of portraying it as a ‘force’. This has the effect of re-establishing the end of a life as a full part of that life, and of reaffirming the individuality of the dying person rather than allowing them to be subsumed into a transpersonal story about death. Included in the book are three verbatim monologues or dialogues from the dying, their close families or the bereaved. These act as lightning rods to ground the experiences in the particular. The region of Trás-os-Montes is one which is becoming depopulated, and the book is also a record not only of the seeping of life from the region but of the particularity of that region’s life as well.

November 2015