Becoming the Harvest

Becoming the Harvest invites the reader to contemplate the fierce transformative initiations of aging and death. Le Bel takes readers through a poignant poetic journey inspired by her intimate experience with the deaths of her loved ones, as well as her acceptance, and often delight, in her own aging body.

Her end of life education began fifteen years ago when she cared for an older sister diagnosed with a terminal illness. It was a soulful time, an unexpected threshold into the beauty and sorrows of living and dying. She sweetened and sharpened her views on aging and death, finding hope and nuance amid the stark reality.

With an unflinching and at times playful eye, Le Bel challenges our cultural stories about the end of life, rejecting the merciless stereotype of the Grim Reaper, and poking gentle fun at our common euphemisms for the end. These are poems to welcome the end years, to claim them, touch them, lightly and deeply. To see aging and death not as the enemy but as a call to live life more fully, to love more thoughtfully.

AUTHOR

Pauline Le Bel

Pauline Le Bel is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and author of Becoming Intimate With the Earth. A singer songwriter, she was called “a musical instrument linked to a soul” for her passionate portrayal of Edith Piaf in a play she co-wrote. She lives on an island in Howe Sound.

Reviews

Le Bel writes with a wisdom and soulfulness that can only come from a deep acceptance and knowledge of what it means to live to age to grieve and to face the final chapter of ones life

Lisa Pahl LCSW cocreator of The Death Deck

Keep on raising hell until Heaven is in sight writes Pauline Le Bel in this meditation on aging and death Fierce wise and featuring a healthy dose of gallows humour Becoming the Harvest is testament to the formidable power that gathers around a life well lived

Rob Taylor author of The News and Weather

Beautifully crafted with wit intimacy and grace A voice of wise ripeness Be nourished

Leah Cline palliative care physician

Oh this is such a beautiful collection I feel all the love all the gratitude all the cheeky humour Approaching ones death shouldnt be this fun Pauline shows that it could be

Chris Corrigan Harvest Moon Consulting

These poems are like a wildflower bouquet surprising charming and very welcome This brief powerful collection embraces deaths inevitability rather than tackling it A gentle reminder that death is simply a really important part of life and it is perfect for anyone who believes that acknowledging mortality makes life more meaningful

Christa Ovenell death educator