Dying to Know

This bold novel dares to suggest that there is another way to understand our relationship to disease and well-being. Not another new treatment but a new vision. Callie Morrow, when confronted with her mother’s death from cancer and horrified by the treatment that preceded it, is determined that if that disease ever shows up in her, she’ll not make the choices her mother did. However, when she stands in the face of just such a choice, she is not so certain.

As an unadventurous freelance photographer who does not even have the grit to develop her ample artistic talent, she seems a sorry candidate for anything outside convention. But when she approaches her longtime friend Mary Chang, a restaurateur down the block from her apartment building, she has her first brush with a very different view of the world. Unknown to Callie, Mary is a student of Taoism, and rather than discouraging Callie’s budding curiosity concerning another way to heal, Mary fosters it.

Still desperately afraid, Callie seeks solace and a second opinion from another friend, world-class Inuit artist and sculptor, Joe Kuptana. They have been close friends for many years. When she drives out to Vancouver Island where he now lives, he pushes her even harder than Mary by telling her that the disease is not her enemy but the fear that owns her life. Add a third friend, Josie Walker, a disheartened internist, and you have the mix of people Callie confronts when her childhood group of friends, The Westside Gang, offer a more commonplace reaction to both Callie’s decision and her disease.

DYING TO KNOW depicts for the reader what it might look like were an average person to decide there must be another way to health and well-being. Her three assisting friends encourage her, while those in the Westside Gang continually taunt her with one terrifying question: what could she possible find out that would be worth this risk?