Becoming Earth

In this posthumous collection of essays, Eva Saulitis meditates on mortality, the art of living fully, and her advancing illness and nearing death, confronting the waiting question without fear or sentimentality: how are you going to live when you know you are going to die?

After beating breast cancer in her late forties, Eva Saulitis again faces the shadow, knowing this time the result will not end well. Saulitis revels in the nostalgia and secret pleasures that come from knowing it's all fleeting. She searches for answers from European poets and Buddhist scholars, from women in treatment chat rooms, from family, from routine; she looks out into the wilderness, at the salmon dying in the river without the ease of morphine, at stone structures broken from water freezing, expanding inside. Becoming Earth is the account of a woman living life in the presence of death, trying to make sense of a world that will keep going, even though she won't.