The Lavender Hour Book

I wonder if I'd feel differently about this book had I not been witness to my mother's death from cancer in the local Hospice and were this not the second anniversary of that passing. The book had passed through too many hands unread, and I felt it deserved a reading, but didn't expect to be drawn in so by it. That we learn from the dying is very true. A lesson in courage, a lesson in strength. One has to be very strong to live fully while dying. I've heard the expression to "live like you were dying, , meaning to live every moment as if it was your last. My mother died like she was living; every moment imbued with hope, optimism, and love -- so much love. She taught me so much on her final journey and continues to teach me still.

And that's what this book is about: the final journey of one man with pancreatic cancer. Jessie, a cancer survivor herself, comes into his life as a Hospice volunteer. "What we forget is as important as what we remember."

When my mother was in Hospice, in those end days, there was a real peacefulness, a sense of waiting, of anticipation, of hope. Not necessarily hope for return of health, but for release and reunion, hope for freedom from pain and an unbinding of the spirit. My husband called it (Hospice) a train station for souls. No one should have to die alone.

This book is called The Lavender Hour, that time between day and dusk, night and dawn, when the boundaries are thin and rebirth mingles with death ( my description, not the author's, which I stupidly didn't mark to quote.) it is about the lessons in dying, choices, how dying serves as a model for life, and about remembrance.