On Living

Kerry Egan spent more than a decade as a hospice chaplain in South Carolina, sitting at the bedsides of dying patients across faiths and across the full economic range of the state. On Living collects the stories her patients wanted told before they died, on motherhood and on regret, on bodies and on forgiveness, on the moments of grace that had carried them and the moments of failure they still carried. Egan writes the way a good chaplain talks, refusing to push her own theology onto the page, and the book moves in short pocket-sized essays that mirror the Tuesdays with Morrie format almost exactly.