Dying: A Father and Son Talk about Life, Regrets, and Making Up Lost Time

As John Henry Clark notes in his book, Dying, as we get older we start to think about our own mortality. Those thoughts become even stronger as our parents age. It’s usually around this time we realize that time is no longer on our side, and if we really want to know more about our parents and the legacy they want to leave, we need to talk to them. Now.

That’s exactly what Clark decided to do. Now in his fifties - with his father in his seventies - he sets out to record his father’s memories and his conversations with him and to put them into this touching slice-of-life memoir.

Clark already has regrets, particularly not making the time to get to know his mother better before she passed away several years earlier. He’s determined not to make the same mistake with his father.

In Dying, Clark shares stories, anecdotes, memories and photographs both of and with his father, learning more about not just his family history, but himself along the way.

Clark’s family may hail from small-town Texas, but the universal themes of love, hate, fear, estrangement and reconciliation are all present here as a grown man seeks to understand how his father chose to live in the world.