by Athena Garner

Created on: January 22, 2009

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a slim volume by Marion Winik. In it, Winik immortalizes men, women and children who touched her life and then passed away. The idea is not entirely original, having been used before to profile fictional characters in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. But Winik creates an astounding array of tales; many of them quirky, most of them hopelessly tragic, all of them true. In her introduction she explains that she finds no sadness in thinking about those she has known and lost because there are so many of them. By sheer numbers, they now constitute a large portion of her social circle and she finds herself talking to them sometimes as if to a living person.

Winik draws not only from her experiences in life and death, but also from her experience as a writer to craft the heartbreaking and charming obituaries. Like most good poems, the tales are brief but packed with description and emotion. Each is also illustrated with an old-fashioned black and white picture related to the person it describes. The epitaph of one of her young son's young teachers is marked by a small drawing of a woman with her hair piled atop her head, clad in a bustled dress and standing before a black board.

By page 65 or so, even the most morbid among us might start to become a bit depressed by the knowledge that after meeting each character, they will be dead within the next page and a half. One gets the idea that Winik scrounged her entire experience to come up with as many dead loved ones and acquaintances as possible. The list seems interminable until one considers that she grew up in an era of drugs and became an adult in the time of the AIDS epidemic. She knew people who died by their own hand, by freak accidents, by cancer, and by murder. By describing them she does what any of us can do with the stories of anyone we have known. She tells us what was so unique about them, illuminating their soul and personality enough to make us mourn with her when even the most misguided, self-destructive of her friends meet their end.

Marion Winik finds the beauty in every life and the common thread that none of us can escape. There is no dwelling on the afterlife and where or when she might next see her dead husband and baby or the eye doctor who treated her as a child. Instead, she combines biography and obituary to bring us a slice of life and a taste of death.

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