The Last Caravan The Power of Community at the End of Life

Author Anna Byrne’ s close friend Mary Morgan spent her life looking for community. As a youth, the pain of Mary’ s mother’ s death is made more difficult by her family’ s silent grief, financial problems and disapproval of her identity as a lesbian. At 17, Mary leaves her troubled home in Toronto to live among the Guna peoples of Panama— an adventure that ignites four decades of social justice work in war-torn countries around the globe. Flying kites with Bedouin children, smoking with Bosnian men, and resisting the Guatemalan Civil War alongside Maya women offers Mary a powerful salve for her yearning to belong: Chosen family— communities based on mutual values and support. When faced with a terminal diagnosis while living in a remote British Columbian town with few resources, Mary brings the heart of her life’ s work— the power of ordinary people to effect change— to bear on her dying. In addition to Anna, she asks two other friends— Jules, and Laurie— to be her “ dying team” and help her to die at home. Over 16 months, until her death with Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), the team embarks on a profound experiment to curate Mary’ s vision of a death steeped in beauty, ceremony, and practical support through building a casket, hosting a home vigil, and transporting her body for a green burial. The journey to bring tenderness and creativity to one person’ s suffering emerges as an antidote to the urgency, scarcity, and loneliness that seek to define our lives— and deaths. Anna Byrne’ s The Last Caravan offers a new paradigm for deathcare by returning it to the hands of the community.

A cancer diagnosis at age 32 shaped Anna Byrne’ s understanding of dying. As a catalyst for human connection, it also led to over a decade of work as an end-of-life educator, speaker and author. Her memoir, Seven Year Summer— a finalist in the Whistler Independent Book Awards— is used as a training tool in hospices; her writing has also appeared in qathet Living, Young Adult Cancer Canada, and Feminism and Religion: How Faiths View Women and Their Rights (Praeger, 2021). Byrne holds degrees in Gerontology, Psychology, Education, and Theology, with a thesis on Medical Assistance in Dying.