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.