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A loving memoir about the life, illness, death and resurrection freedom of Christian mother, writer and community activist Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann. The book’s first half focuses on her inspiring life, including her activism, journalism and documentary filmmaking. The second half follows her glioblastoma brain cancer, when Jeanie chose a process of dying well involving family and community.
Reviewers describe the book’s mix of letters, poetry and stories as flashes of raw beauty and abject brilliance.
The theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, Of course all of us are precious in God’s sight. But some of ‘all of us’ stand out because of their freedom, their courage and their tenacity. We call them ‘saints.’ Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann was one such. She embodied gospel passion that led her beyond herself to a rich network of justice and restoration.
The book was written by Jeanie’s husband Bill Wylie-Kellermann, also a nationally known social-justice activist and writer–and her partner in many social justice causes over the years. A great summary of the book can be found in the first eight words Bill wrote: This book is verily an event of community. That choice of verily, which evokes memories stretching back to the age of Chaucer, was no accident.
In these 425 pages, Bill begins by chronicling Jeanie’s robust life and then he shares many equally inspiring stories about the seven-year progress from diagnosis of a glioblastoma until her death. In verily on that first page, Bill is signaling to readers that this book is as much about memory as it is about this couple’s cutting-edge, social-justice activism.
Early reviewers repeatedly praised Dying Well as a profound love story about the two writer-activists who led a tumultuous life at the barricades of many justice issues–and then shared in an equally inspiring quest for healing and eventually after many years a graceful death. Ultimately, though, this book expands into an invitation for readers to remember: Remember a real love story you’ve known of an impassioned couple who became impassioned parents. Remember the best of family life. And remember, when the arc of life is closing its path in this tangible world–remember how loving families used to care for the dying and also the mourners in the humble surroundings of home.
As readers experience our story, many of them are going to remember things about their own families. In our collective memory, in our community memory, we all know a lot more about family life as it shapes the eventual process of death and dying than we realize, Bill Wylie-Kellermann said in an interview about his book. Talk to your relatives, especially the older people, and you’ll find we’re not that far removed from vigils for loved ones in parlors, back before the funeral industry took over most of this process from us. These family-based and community-based stories of caring for the dying, right up through the vigil and funeral–that’s a memory only a generation or two removed from most of us. These memories are still in our bones. We still can come together as family and community in ways that once were so natural for us. This story isn’t as much about pushing some new agenda about dying well as it is remembering the power of community and family that we can reclaim.
Reading these pages, the love will jump right off the page, writes their daughter, the writer-activist Lydia Wylie-Kellermann in her Foreword to the book. I hope that within these pages, we all find a bit of your own story and a friend on the journey.
