Lately in my creative nonfiction class, we have been reading and writing memoir. To help me write my own (short) memoir piece, I read Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly.

Eugene O’Kelly was the CEO of KPMG before he died in 2005 of brain cancer. The memoir, written in the three months between his diagnosis and his death, was published posthumously in 2008.

If someone hadn’t read memoir before, this book would be a good one to start with. It does not use extensive figurative language, it has a lot of summary, but it is relatively short and extremely powerful.

The subtitle of the book is How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. O’Kelly didn’t have much time to live, but he had enough to obsess over it and let it ruin him. That is not what he did. Instead, he thought of the dying process similar to how he approached his business organization. Instead his first line of the first chapter is “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.”

I do not usually recommend reading the end before reading the middle of a book, but O’Kelly’s wife, Corinne, wrote a phenomenal afterword. In it, she wrote about the events right around his time of death, the events that he could not. In the afterword, a hospice doctor visits and tells her about patients who was not close to his family and was severely agitated until he died, restless. The hospice doctor told Corinne that “Your husband isn’t agitated. He’s peaceful.” He had accepted his disease and resolved any unresolved relationships.

I can’t help think of my grandma who has Dementia. Her husband made a choice not to tell her what disease was setting in, so she never knew what was happening. And when she dies, she will have no concrete memory of the past six years. At least Eugene O’Kelly knew and could say goodbye, could make amends.

Death has always puzzled us. It has intrigued us. It is an unknown that many have conquered, but none truly understand.