An uplifting journey of truly seeing and appreciating what makes life
worth living in the year following a terminal diagnosis
For fans of Ann Patchett's These Precious Days and Joan Didion's The
Year of Magical Thinking
Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is an unforgettable book that tells the
story of a singular year of challenges, insights, and peculiar gifts. It
is also a sort of postcard from a place many of us will one day visit.
After thirty-two years of teaching, Joe Monninger, an avid outdoorsman
in robust health, was looking forward to a long retirement with the love
of his life in a cabin beside a New England estuary. Three days after
his last class, however, he's diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, even
though he has not smoked for more than 30 years. It was May, and he
might be dead by early fall.
Soon Joe learned, however, that he was a genetic match for treatment
with a drug that could not cure his cancer, but could prolong his life.
With this temporary reprieve, he sets out to live life to the fullest
and to write about the year of grace that follows, from his cancer
treatments to his innermost thoughts.
Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is a work of wisdom and insight. Joe
Monninger's aubade to the world that he knew and loved offers a
page-turning, suspenseful story to relish and to celebrate, to share and
to discuss, to ponder and to learn from.
"Full of heart and discovery." - Booklist, on Joseph Monninger's
writing
