This Is Not The End Of Me: Lessons on Living from a Dying Man

For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Will Schwalbe, the moving, inspiring story of a young husband and father who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-three, sets out to build a legacy for his infant son.

At the age of thirty-three, Layton Reid, a wedding photographer from Halifax, was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma. The cancer was first detected years earlier, and after fighting it and going into remission, he had ditched his life as a wandering bachelor to finally settle down. When the cancer returned, he and his wife, Candace, were now expecting their first child. Fearing side effects and poor results from chemotherapy and radiation, he and his family threw themselves into pursuing an extreme alternative therapy, which he was certain would save his life. Two years later, Layton’s cancer spread to his brain, and quitting the therapy, he devoted his energy to preparing his infant son, Finn, for life without him.

With incredible intimacy, power, insight, and empathy, reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty, who first met Layton when she hired him to shoot her wedding, tells the story of her friend Layton’s illness; of his free spirit, effervescence, and captivating personality, eloquence, and lack of sentimentality, which drew her to him; and of the journey his fiercely devoted family–his parents, Willie and Phil, and brother Matt–undertook with him, in order to examine how a person dies, and how we might build a legacy in our information-saturated age.

Powerful and unvarnished, This Is Not the End of Me contains moments of great beauty and humour, and reminds us of what it means to live.