“Cappello turns her piercing compound gaze, this time, to the experience of death and dying. She demands not so much that we see her mother–a woman as hyperliterate and possibly even more in love with life than her daughter–as that we not look away from her arduous passing. In this intricate filigree of language and occasional bright beads of images, Cappello comes perhaps as close as it’s possible to get to the threshold without crossing over oneself.”
To write in grief’s aftermath is to manufacture astonishment; to grieve is to be perpetually astonished by the greatest love.
When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary’s one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays–with her mother’s own writing interspersed–Frost Will Come is a daughter’s tribute to her mother’s months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.
In the tradition of Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness and Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor: spontaneous, fresh, unadorned, frank, and open. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge–from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a “peaceful death” as a sign of a moral failing.
Frost Will Come is much more than a memoir of grief. It is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.
– University of Wisconsin Press
Praise for FROST WILL COME:
“Reading Mary Cappello, I feel the physical location of my heart move. It doesn’t sit back in my chest anymore but has edged forward, closer to the world. This rearrangement only happens on those rarest of occasions when the reader says to the author, ‘The way you write, think, look, live. . . . I trust you with my life.'” – Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic
“A beautiful and devastating work, darkly illuminating, filled with wisdom and sorrow and wonder. Palpable grief and love infuse every page. Cappello is our perfect guide as she traverses with fortitude and grace this most sacred terrain. A devotion like no other. Exceptional.” – Carole Maso, author of Mother and Child: A Novel
“Cappello offers the whole of her mother’s life so we can feel the entirety of her death. This is a book about care – the grueling, monotonous, terrifying, nourishing acts of devotion, endurance, witness, and nurturing in the face of immeasurable loss. Both elegy and homage, Frost Will Come is capacious in its honesty and grief, longing and astonishment. Meticulous in its attention to detail, feeling, contradiction, and every possible intimacy, this book delivers a rare communion.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl
“Frost Will Come centers on the passing of the author’s mother, artist and poet Rosemary Cappello. Unsettling, tender, often funny, Cappello’s work guides us through the profound vigil that is death by cancer – walking with a loved one ‘in the bardo of her dying – a place of absolute freedom and absolute tedium, of sacred sleep and ceaseless dreaming, of breathing alongside.’ This story is intimate without sentimentality and wise without pretense. Cappello’s frank, gorgeous prose mirrors the gritty beauty she finds in the death of this vital spirit. All of us will need this book at some point in our lives; many need it now. A stunning achievement.” – Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Devil’s Castle
“A portrait of love and devotion bestowed during crisis; a celebration of art and literature and music at a time when those essential aspects of life are currently under duress; and a profound exploration of how life can be found in death, how deep attention can let memory breathe, and how memory can serve as a kind of resurrection. Haunting and inspiring, Frost Will Come is a book of humane complexity characterized at every turn by the graceful river of Cappello’s insight and prose.” – Philip Graham, author of What the Dead Can Say
“In her searing, searching memoir, Cappello breaks ajar the door to the bardo to reveal that the beings toward which love most radically draws us are themselves irreversibly drawn away. Every page is written from inside that liability. Here, dying becomes a way of knowing, suffering a mode of inquiry, and love a reckoning with oblivion and the profligate generosity of what remains.” – Marta Werner, author of Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours