Heartwood

March 15, 2021
A Manhattan-based interfaith minister grapples with the complexities of mortality. When Becker's childhood friend Marisa died from cancer at age 40, the author was understandably crushed. However, the event also opened a long-suppressed wellspring of insecurities about death, and Becker's grieving process became life-altering. She began approaching life more proactively, spiritually, and ecologically. She planted bulbs in a makeshift plot in the city, attended a silent meditation retreat, practiced the Japanese "forest bathing" and "water children" rituals, and made a general promise to herself to "participate more fully in everyday matters." The author shows how this intensive self-reflection benefited her on many levels, and she hopes to inspire others to participate in their own introspection when encountering life's myriad challenges. Among other episodes and life events that led her to a more intentional soul-searching journey: a dangerous internship in politically unstable Bangladesh, a miscarriage, her father's struggles with Alzheimer's disease, and family losses from Covid-19. In too many instances, she writes, "death had slipped quietly into my home and declared herself my teacher." But what, she asks, "was I supposed to do with these understandings in the practical, brass-tacks way of a modern woman going about her daily business?" While the book as a whole is inspiring, the most moving passages involve Becker's time as a hospice volunteer. Though consistently heartbreaking and often frustrating, the author's experiences were also transformative. She incorporated compassionate Zen Buddhist end-of-life practices into her own humanitarian service vows, and a host of nurturing interpersonal experiences broadened her understanding of how her life could be made more useful in both spiritual and altruistic empathetic service to those in need. Once firmly entrenched in our "death-shy" contemporary culture, the author is now a reassuring advocate for peace and interreligious understanding, and she views dying as an opportunity to seek enlightenment and give thanks, regardless of one's preferred spiritual path. A graceful meditation on divine deliverance.

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April 1, 2021
Heartwood is the dead center of a tree that allows for new growth, and a metaphor for death in the midst of life that threads through these essays from Becker, an interfaith minister. Although she had previously held jobs doing good work, 9/11 propelled her to work as a hospice volunteer. Many essays discuss the patients she encounters, but she also discloses her personal life: struggles with infertility and miscarriage, the death of close friends, family members suffering from Alzheimer's, being befriended by a recently widowed dad and his five kids on vacation, and the literal family skeleton and what to do with it. Barack Obama's mother also appears in these pages. Some essays seem forced at the end, as if she needed to tie things up quickly, but all delve into what it means to live in the shadow of death and ""how to better live our lives,"" to revere life for the gift that it is. This insightful, quietly moving book is not just for the grieving or those who comfort them.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 23, 2021

"Something really does happen when we bear witness to the lives of others," observes Becker in her moving debut memoir. That something, according to Becker, is a seemingly counterintuitive understanding that when humans connect with each other, the notion of our mortality can become easier to bear. This is the lesson Becker imparts as she recounts the many lives and deaths she has witnessed as both a hospice volunteer and interfaith minister. The author celebrates those lives with easy and unadorned prose, and offers honest reflection on how each has strengthened her trust in life and loss. She doesn't claim that saying goodbye is always easy; indeed, sometimes the things the dying need to hear are the hardest for the living to say, Becker writes, detailing the heartbreaking moment when she told her father it was okay to finally let go. Yet despite the pain of loss, Becker explains, she has come to learn that like the rings that surround the heartwood of a tree, "the dead become the heart of the living and the living nourish the enduring essence of the dead." VERDICT An affecting and informative memoir about the lessons we can glean from life as well as death.--Megan Duffy, Glen Ridge P.L., NJ

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