On November 23, 2022, 77-year-old retired chemist David Perry died in a hospital bed installed in his bungalow in Norwich, England, nine days after receiving a diagnosis of metastatic esophageal cancer. Death of an Ordinary Man is his daughter-in-law novelist Sarah Perry's frank, compassionate account of those final days, her first work of nonfiction and a moving meditation on death and life.
Perry (The Essex Serpent; Melmoth) describes an afternoon tea date at which she waited with her husband, Robert, David's only child. She observed, as David approached, that "there was death in his gait, in his grim and concentrated stare, in the dense grey pallor on his cheek." David's feeling "in a muddle" and difficulty swallowing led to tests that confirmed advanced cancer, a diagnosis her self-effacing father-in-law accepted with equanimity.
David spent much of his married life caring for a wife disabled by rheumatoid arthritis; she predeceased him by 10 years. He enjoyed stamp collecting, sudoku, and gardening, and was a faithful parishioner at his Baptist church. But it immediately became clear to Perry and Robert that his precipitous decline would rob him irrevocably of those modest pleasures.
Perry's writing has an unassuming lyricism that makes even the hardest moments of this story resonate. Her expertly modulated prose mirrors the compression of David's final days. Perry's opportunity to be intimate with David's dying brings with it not merely a deeper understanding of death but an appreciation of the preciousness of the life that precedes it. Death of an Ordinary Man is not an easy book, but it's an undeniably important one: brave, candid, and above all, painfully beautiful. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer