“In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying” by Eve Joseph

“In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying” is Canadian poet Eve Joseph’s attempt to understand the process of death. With language as her thread, Joseph weaves a tapestry of memoir, research and philosophy that’s unbounded by space and time. “Mythology, legend, imagination, and poetry grow out of the same black soil as death,” she writes. “All exist beyond the frontiers of logic.”

While its lack of a cohesive narrative can be challenging, “In the Slender Margin” successfully blends Joseph’s stories from her family with her musings on art and poetry, hospice and death. She quotes from poets, healthcare workers and intellectuals – including Annie Dillard, an obvious inspiration for her prose. And she shares a wide array of facts and figures:

“The World Population Clock, which operates continuously, currently estimates that each second 4.3 people are born and 1.8 people die. Of the fifty-two million people who die every year, falling coconuts kill one hundred fifty of them, which, if true, makes the tropical fruits about ten times more dangerous than sharks.”

Some of these transitions initially feel jarring, but they eventually smooth into a meditative inquiry on the liminal spaces, in which her mother and brother figure prominently. Joseph, who lost her 27-year-old brother to a car accident when she was 12, was later drawn toward the unexplored nature of his loss.

“To work with the dying is to step out of the known world into the unknown; it was as if death itself had an intimate knowledge of my brother that I could only access by becoming its confidante.”

Working at the largest hospice on Vancouver Island, Joseph was regularly confronted with death in all of its beauty and misery. “The smells and sounds of death were kind of like muzak,” she writes. “Not loud but always in the background.” Early on in her more than 20-year career, Joseph’s mentor handed her a book by Russell Lockhart called “Words as Eggs.” And while Joseph writes that she “couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” she has an obvious appreciation for language – exploring the roots of words such as palliative, limbo, euphemism and hope.

Eve Joseph, poet and author of “In the Slender Margin”
Credit: evejoseph.wordpress.com

“In the Slender Margin” Will Appeal to the Bereaved

Joseph’s desire for comprehension, her multifaceted approach, and her fearlessness at moving through a world of shadows will appeal to anyone who’s lost a loved one and left with unanswered questions. Readers managing an extended illness or grappling with tragic loss might appreciate her candor; others may be put off by her more graphic descriptions of the many ways in which our bodies can fail us.

But perhaps most valuable for those facing death – their own, or another’s – is Joseph’s repeated assertion that, despite her experience, she has no idea how to do that. She shares a multitude of stories, including that of a hospice counselor, Miriam, who was able to sing the Shema, a traditional Jewish prayer, for a dying patient.

“The wonder is that she walked into that room at that time without any notion of what might be helpful and was used in the service of the good. That’s the thing. To be used in the service of the good.”

“In the Slender Margin” was published in 2014. Joseph has since published “Quarrels,” which won Canada’s 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize – including the three poems she reads below, part of an elegy to her father.

As Joseph writes, “to be with the dying is to wade into mystery.” By reading “In the Slender Margin,” we can join her there.