As John Henry Clark notes in his book, Dying, as we get older we start to think about our own mortality. Those thoughts become even stronger as our parents age. It's usually around this time we realize that time is no longer on our side, and if we really want to know more about our parents and the legacy they want to leave, we need to talk to them. Now.
That's exactly what Clark decided to do. Now in his fifties - with his father in his seventies - he sets out to record his father's memories and his conversations with him and to put them into this touching slice-of-life memoir.
Clark already has regrets, particularly not making the time to get to know his mother better before she passed away several years earlier. He's determined not to make the same mistake with his father.
In Dying, Clark shares stories, anecdotes, memories and photographs both of and with his father, learning more about not just his family history, but himself along the way.
Clark's family may hail from small-town Texas, but the universal themes of love, hate, fear, estrangement and reconciliation are all present here as a grown man seeks to understand how his father chose to live in the world.
About the Author: John Henry Clark is an award-winning journalist, freelance writer, author and avid golfer who was born and raised in Texas. He grew up in northwest Houston playing sports at Oaks Dads Club and attending church with his parents, but decided as he got older that things he learned in Sunday school no longer made much sense.
Since then, he has spent a lifetime seeking answers and exploring a variety of beliefs. After a successful career as a newspaper reporter, Clark turned his lifetime love for learning into a new career as a public school teacher, and that gave him time during the summer months to pursue his project to research and write a book describing what people believe about God and why they believe whatever it is they believe. The result was "Finding God."
A few years later, Clark began feeling the need to have a big adventure. He discovered the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a 500-mile cross-country pilgrimage, and before too long he was on an overseas flight to Madrid. When he returned to the U.S. a month later, Clark wrote "Camino: laughter and tears along Spain's 500-mile Camino de Santiago." Both these books are highly personal and insightful looks inside the human spirit. Read them both, and you will quite possibly discover something new about yourself.
