Ash's lifelong best friend Edi is dying in a hospice near where she lives in Western Mass. Edi's husband and young son remain in Brooklyn, in accordance with Edi's wishes. Ash goes back and forth between the hospice (called Shapely) and her home (where she lives with her teenage daughter, Belle; older daughter Jules is at MIT, and husband Honey has moved out, but still makes frequent appearances). As Edi's death from ovarian cancer approaches, Edi has periods of lucidity, specific cravings, and vivid memories, and those around her experience the drawn-out loss with grief, compassion, and morbid humor.

See also: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

Quotes

We held her while the biggest loss of her life - which was bigger than the loss of her actual life - sank into her like mercury. (26)

"I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash." (Honey, 65)

It's the anticipation I can't handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare? (67)

Edi's memory is like a backup hard drive for mine, and I have that same crashing, crushing feeling you have when the beach ball on your computer starts spinning. (84)

"What do you think happens after you die?"
...
"I believe there's some kind of energy....Maybe you turn into a kind of free-floating consciousness that surrounds the people you love so that you're kind of there with them still and the air they breathe is somehow made out of you....I guess I'm not sure what I think - besides that the people we lose stay with us somehow." (89)

"It's so frustrating that I'm stuck in this stupid, sick body," she says. "It seems so inessential, somehow, but then, there's really nowhere else for me to go." (Edi, 89)

If there's a metaphor for our friendship, it might be this. The blind faith. The absolute dependability. The love like a compass, its north always true. (102)

Everyone dies, and yet it's unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? (150)

It's been so arduous, Edi's dying. It's like we've all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there's this hole here. (188)

It's the deep well of nothing where Edi should be, like if you poked a painful tooth with your tongue, only the tooth was gone, and you got sucked, tongue-first, into a black hole. I stash thoughts and experiences in my mental Edi file to talk to her about later, and then realize that they'll stay there forever. (203) ( )

I read this as a book club selection. The novel is about two lifelong BFFs. One is in hospice and the other grapples with the approaching loss, grief, and generally her bad life choices. I absolutely detested this book. The writing and editing were awful. The characters were flat and really more caricatures of some "type", all which were badly drawn. The dialogue was laughably fake. I didn't even cry even though the book was definitely manipulating the reader in that direction. ( )

Quite a good representation of the process of dying and the impact on the relationship between the dying person and her life-long friend. The living friend's behaviour was perhaps a little too far off 'normal' to be believable and the ending spoilt the story somewhat. Ninety per cent of the story was good and engaging, with great narrating of the audiobook version. ( )

Sad and funny ( )

Amazing book on hospice families and dying. This is a book about friends and family. ( )