[Perspectives] Strangeness, wonder, and beauty

Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man is one of the best books I have read about human health. It is also one of the toughest. Her account of the death of David, her father-in-law, from oesophageal cancer contains details familiar to me from the final days of my own father; in fact, I imagine that they are also familiar to innumerable others, although I have never seen them written down before. I am not only talking about Perry's observations of the physical process of death: the rapid weight loss, the long periods of torpor, the brief bouts of lucidity.