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 thirty-two shaped Anna Byrne’s understanding of dying as a catalyst for human connection and 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, 2016). Byrne holds degrees in Gerontology, Psychology, Education, and Theology, with a thesis on Medical Assistance in Dying. She delivers keynotes, workshops, and training for organizations such as the Canadian Cancer Society, the BC Hospice Palliative Care Association, and Vancouver Island University. She lives in qathet, British Columbia, on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation, where she coordinates services for a hospice society and co-founded Community-Supported Dying qathet, an initiative to equip communities to care for those who are aging, ill or grieving.