Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times by Darlene Madott

Reviewed by Ann Cavlovic

First off: young people, do not be put off by the title! Although this collection does indeed depict relationship losses amid other endings and grief, it is also a master class in seeing the red flags a character misses in the moment. Reading this while young might just save you from missing a few in your own life.

With that out of the way, I’ll offer a more conventional start to a review. The Closing Ceremonies portion of the book is a collection of short stories that are revealed to be a mix of autofiction and fiction. Dying Times is an update to a previously published novella. The two parts hang together by exploring common territory. Overall, this is a tender-hearted, wise, honest, and beautifully crafted book for anyone brave enough to deeply love people they are always at risk of losing.

The stories within Closing Ceremonies often centre on the recurring character of Francesca at various stages of her life. We see her in all her imperfect glory with her son, lovers, and good friend Concetta. We circle around her character arc from different times, points-of-view, and circumstances, creating an effect like holding an object up to a light and rotating it to study and appreciate its full texture and beauty.

At one point an encounter with a stranger sooths Francesca’s loneliness, and his parting comment encapsulates what these stories point to: “People come and go. Some through death. Some, abandonment. But the love remains. Not necessarily for the one you thought you were loving. Maybe the capacity to love. The love remains – in all its wondrous forms and varieties.”

The last few stories depart from conventionally plot-driven structures and transform into a paean and profound meditation that will resonate with anyone who has loved and lost by any form of ending. This reader found herself furtively underlining and rereading passages, including some excerpts from other relevant texts, including this from Anthony de Mello: “You may be one of those persons who cannot bear to even think of the death or the loss of a parent, a friend, a loved one. If this is so, and in the measure that this is so, you are dead. The thing to do is to face the death, the loss, the separation, from loved things and loved ones now.”

These stories help us see that anything less than a brave, wide-eyed stare down of the finite reality of our lives diminishes the life we are currently living.

Another fascinating connecting thread concerns the question of how much we really know the people we love. It can take a very long time to really know a person, and even longer if we ignore Maya Angelou’s famous advice to believe someone the first time they show themselves for who they are. “Francesca never understood how hidden a person can be, though fully exposed, even naked.” It took Francesca twenty years to understand her beloved, even though he had explicitly said he was his own top priority, and after about four others, “whatever is left over is for the woman.”

Only two stories within Closing Ceremonies proceed without Francesca. The first and opening story is about coming-of-age in the 60s, where a young girl trying to evade the sexism of the times runs into misunderstandings of Indigenous life. The second, “What To Do In Case of Hurricane,” is a gripping and haunting play-by-play of how a love-bombing and probably narcissistic man swept a woman off her feet, braided against lines from an actual hurricane instruction manual from a resort the characters visit. These stories feel different but not out of place – I enjoyed the quirky detail that one character went to the same exasperated therapist as Francesca.

Then we reach the novella Dying Times, in which the narrator braids vignettes around the simultaneous decline of her mother, her senior law partner, and a client bent on punishing his ex-wife with his last breaths. Many of these read like connected pieces of flash fiction, with dark humour, insights around how to live a good life, and how one grief triggers all previous ones. The sickness and dying of the mother brings up tensions with a sister, and although initially told more than shown, we come to understand the unhealed wounds that enabled the rift.

I’m enriched for having read Madott’s work.

Just be warned: some stories in this collection will make you very hungry for Italian food!

Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times is published by Guernica Editions.