Mark Raphael Baker started writing this memoir on his first night in hospital after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022. His wife, Kerryn, had died of a rare gastric cancer seven years before. His brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer just two years after Kerryn. He is also reckoning with the death of his elderly father. The emotional intensity of these losses is the foundation of A Season of Death. ‘Three graves in five years,’ Baker writes. ‘While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared. I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying.’