MEMOIR
A Season of Death: A memoir
Mark Raphael Baker
MUP, $29.99
This book wraps its arms around our deepest fears and holds them gently. Before his untimely death in 2023, Mark Baker had become and extraordinary observer of grief, loss and pain. He never wanted to wear this mantle. Life had other ideas.
His first book, The Fiftieth Gate (1997), accompanies his parents on a journey back to Europe where, as young people, they had endured the horrors of the Shoah. It ranks alongside Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes as a monument to memory and the act of bearing witness. Baker writes in the preface to the 20th-anniversary edition, “it is up to us to bring light into the dark places of the world – be it Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur or Syria – and to find new understandings of what lies behind that most mysterious of gates where all of us inhabit the one room.”
The image of inhabiting a single room is a beautiful image of shared humanity. Baker never finds pain isolating. It always connects him with the subterranean springs that water the human race. Thirty Days (2017) documents the dying of his wife, Kerryn, as she journeys into cancer, gradually shedding every aspect of her life other than love. The one room of a hospital becomes an entire existential landscape.
A Season of Death is the third book of a remarkable trilogy in which the focus of loss narrows and deepens. This time Baker confronts his own death. He does so with a serene spirit which has moments of acceptance. There is also anger. Baker does not live to complete the work. His memoir ends in the company of his toddler. “Am I really running?” he asks.
After a period of mourning, Mark partners with Michelle, 20 years his junior, with whom he shares not just a view of the world but also a deep cultural belonging. They get married according to the Jewish ritual that sustains them both. The service includes breaking a glass underfoot. “The sound of glass crashing not tiny fragments carries with it the meaning that even in our happiest moment, the world is broken, and that our task is to repair it piece by piece, a call to social justice that underpins one of the core messages of Judaism – tikkun olam, ‘healing the world’.”
Baker with his wife and daughter at his final family Passover in 2023.
Death is at every elbow. Baker’s Father, Yossl, a Holocaust survivor, dies after a fall in a pokies venue in Surfers Paradise. His brother Johnny dies 10 months after his diagnosis with cancer. Michelle struggles to conceive a child through IVF but, just as hope is fading, the couple are blessed by the arrival of little Melila. “Our happiness is obvious to everyone.” Mark looks forward to long life with his new family, even if sometimes he is mistaken as Melila’s grandfather.
Sadly, Baker has symptoms for a long time before doctors are prepared to take him seriously and the worst kind of pancreatic cancer is diagnosed. The nonchalance of well-paid professionals is staggering. Baker doesn’t have time to be angry, but the reader will. Even then, Baker’s wry humour stays with him. “I was treated to the one silver lining in the cloud: an upgrade to the new oncology ward which resembled a hotel.” Earlier he had resolved, “I will always use humour as a weapon.”