Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end.In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street. Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn - endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don't know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator's work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives - no matter how little we live them. Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death - and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.