Making Friends With Death

Fort Collins author Laura Pritchett veers away from her usual fiction, with her new book that serves as a handbook for those who wish to have a good end of life experience. Making Friends with Death, a field guide for your impending last breath (to be read ideally before it’s imminent).

Pritchett has been a fiction writer for most of her career, but about a decade ago she had friends and family members die, whose deaths were very painful and medicalized. In addition she experienced her own health care crisis that got her thinking that her own end of life could be near.

“I wasn’t sure, the diagnosis kept shifting around and so on, but at one point it didn’t matter, I thought “I’m just really not ready to go, I’m not comfortable with going, I’m not happy about going and what can I do to help myself prepare?” and so I wrote the book originally for me.”

The result is a essentially a handbook that seeks to inspire people to start to think about how they would like the end of their life to be, and to inspire them to live a better life.

“We’ve got to accept responsibility, it’s our death and if we want a good death we have to claim it.”

Laura Pritchett will speak at Old Firehouse Books, 232 Walnut Street, Fort Collins at 6pm on October 26th;  At the Oriental Theatre in Denver for “Mortified” on October 28th; At the Book Bar in Denver at 5pm on October 29th and the Boulder Bookstore at 7.30pm on Monday October 30th.

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