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Here’s a gist-bullet summary of Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry:
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The author’s father-in-law, David Perry, was a typically “ordinary” man: he loved simple pleasures (stamp-collecting, fish & chips, comic novels, his local church, watching The Antiques Roadshow). (Jaffé & Neale)
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In autumn 2022 he was diagnosed with cancer and died just nine days after diagnosis. (Penguin)
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Sarah and her husband looked after him at home through his final days: bathing, cleaning, dressing, sitting with him, singing, praying, talking — witnessing minute-by-minute how body and spirit change as death approaches. (Apple)
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The book is not primarily about grief—rather it is about dying, about care, about love and family as much as about death itself. (Penguin)
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It explores how an “ordinary” life and death can nevertheless reveal something extraordinary: the depth in the mundane, the dignity (and indignity) of dying, what it means to be human and cared for. (ourdailyread.com)
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It also comments on systemic/structural realities in healthcare and caregiving: the rapid progression of illness, the load falling on relatives, the appearances and disappearances of carers, the blur between service and love. (ourdailyread.com)
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Ultimately, the memoir invites us to face the inevitability and strangeness of death — not as something distant or abstract, but as something approaching, and somehow entwined with everyday life. (ourdailyread.com)
If you like, I can pull out 5-10 key quotes from the book (or early reviews) to flesh this further.
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Here are some meaningful quotes from Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry (along with context to help you see how they reflect the themes of the book).
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“I knew immediately, with the cool and perfect certainty of arithmetic, that he was more or less a dead man.”
— Describing the moment Perry recognises that her father-in-law is dying. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It captures how death can announce itself in the everyday, with startling clarity. -
“Death has a duration and an amplitude, with events as various and strange as those of a life.”
— A reflection from the memoir. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It challenges the idea that dying is a brief instant; instead it becomes something extended, complex, full of variation. -
“No other occupation entailed acts of service that sometimes resembled love, all carried out with such an extraordinary asymmetry of power.”
— On the caregiving she and others perform. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It highlights the power-imbalance in care (between carer and cared-for) and how that intersects with love, duty, intimacy. -
“These things not cancelling each other out as they ought to have done, but persisting in undiminished quantities, like a failure of simple maths.”
— On how death’s gravity and mundane life continue side by side. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It expresses a tension between what we expect (death supersedes life) and reality (they overlap and co-exist in odd ways). -
“He shows love… via punctiliousness, each January entering birthdays into a new wall calendar and then marking them with a tick once a card is sent.”
— On her father-in-law’s character and how love was shown. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It emphasises that ordinary gestures carry meaning, and that an “ordinary” life can have deep love embedded in the small details. -
“The dying body… the desiccating lips and hands, the skin the colour and texture of vellum parchment… the labourer’s hands now resembling ‘those of a Russian pianist’.”
— Writings on her father-in-law’s physical decline. (The Guardian)
Why it matters: It confronts the undignified, raw nature of dying bodies AND finds in that something strange, beautiful, transfiguring.
If you like, I can pull 10 more quotes (with page-numbers if available) and group them by themes such as caregiving, the body, time & death, ordinary life. Would you like me to do that?
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