Book description
When his mother Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Rory
MacLean and his wife Katrin took her into their home. For five months,
as their life fragmented and turned inward, they fought both to resist
and to accept the inevitable. Each gave vent to their emotions in
different ways, but all three kept a diary. Heartbreakingly honest and
deeply moving, Gift of Time is the story of those days, in the words
of a son, his wife and his mother. Woven together into a poignant
meditation on life and death, they illuminate the courage and dignity
of one woman who confronted what we all must face. Threaded through
with wisdom and guilt, anger and acceptance, the story is punctuated
by a family wedding and the hope of new life, by bin-bags of old
letters and books rediscovered, by the end of winter and the first
signs of spring. Powerful, raw and urgent, this slender volume is
above all a celebration of life. Capturing every moment of beauty and
pain it acknowledges that what survives all of us is love.
