IONA LECTURE SERIES
Where Arts & Sciences Meet Humanity
AN EVENING LECTURE & CONVERSATION
with
Mark Dowie
JUDITH LETTING GO
Six Months in the World's Smallest Death Cafe
Thursday, June 6
7pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
An old man learns how to die from a poet facing death
For the entire six months that Mark Dowie became friends with Judith Tannenbaum, they both knew she was going to die. In fact, for most of that time they knew the exact hour she would go . . . sometime between 11:00 AM and noon, December 5, 2019, which she did.
They talked about many things during those months, but the rapidly approaching moment of Judith’s death came to inform and shape their entire conversation. Death was, as she said, “the undercurrent and the overstory of our relationship”. . . one of the deepest, most profound and fulfilling of Mark’s life.
This book brings up issues of the right to plan one’s death, but it is ultimately about the lost human art of releasing everything that matters to the living in preparation for the inevitable. It is a rare lesson offered by a poet who somehow taught herself, and then the author, how to let go.
Mark Dowie is a former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine, a prior editor for InterNation and Guernica magazine, the founder of Talking Point Radio and a contributing editor of Orion. At the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he taught science, environmental reporting, and foreign correspondence. Dowie’s works have won nineteen journalism awards, including four National Magazine Awards, a George Polk Award, a William Allen White Gold Medal, and a Media Alliance’s Meritorious Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters by John F. Kennedy University and is author of eight previous books.
