At 85, Gail Godwin survived a broken neck. She reveals her ‘extra life’ in new book

The author, a three-time National Book Award finalist, reflects in her latest book, 'Getting to Know Death: A Meditation.'

On June 6, 2022, acclaimed novelist Gail Godwin decided to water the small dogwood tree she had planted the week before outside her home in Woodstock, New York. She stepped carefully, using her walking cane, but paused at the wrong moment while trying to make her way through a patch of gravel. And then: “You are down. Flat on your face in the gravel. It has happened. Your head and neck are twisted to the left. Blood dripping onto the gravel.”

A neurosurgeon told Godwin, then 85, that she had “too many issues for surgery,” and ordered her to wear a hard collar for six months. She spent a long time in a rehabilitation facility, waiting for her broken neck to heal — but it didn’t, and she eventually had to have surgery anyway. 

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Godwin, a three-time National Book Award finalist for “The Odd Woman,” “Violet Clay,” and “A Mother and Two Daughters,” reflects on her fall and its aftermath in her latest book, “Getting to Know Death: A Meditation.” The book is a digressive, moving, and often funny reflection on the topic of dying; Godwin writes not only about her own fall and thoughts on mortality, but about the people she has lost in her life, and her own encounters with “the desperate place,” where she is visited by thoughts such as “I can’t see a way out of this,” “Things will not necessarily get better,” and “This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.” 

Godwin wrote the book in the seven months she spent in recovery. “During that time, I did not read any novels,” she says. “I couldn’t read a novel, and I didn’t watch any TV. I just felt something was closed to me. That’s one reason I could write it so quickly.”

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Godwin answered questions about her book via telephone from her home in Woodstock. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: The epigraph for the book comes from Christopher Hitchens: “Live dyingly.” What does that advice mean to you?

He wrote that towards the end of his life when he really was dying, and it means to me that as long as you have your mind and you’re alive, you’ve got a foot in death and you’ve got a foot in life, and you can go back and forth, like a sort of exercise. And funny enough, I’m glad. I’m glad it happened now, but I wasn’t then. 

Q: Early in the book, you recount the fall that sent you to the hospital. Was it difficult for you to write about that, or did you find it cathartic at all?

It was not at all difficult. That’s the way it started. I thought, “Well, I’m a writer and I have to write about being in a cage for six and seven months,” and so I just started writing in the second person: “You fell,” “You did this.” The place where the whole thing just came together was when I was trying to get inside after the fall, and I could not stand up. So I was walking with my butt, and it was quite a while, quite a long way. And then I heard a voice in me say, “Am I going to make it?” And this voice said, “Do you want to?” I said, “I’m not sure.” And the voice said, “Yes or no?” I said, “I haven’t decided.” But I think that was kind of how I wrote the book. It was a provisional life I was in, and it’s been that way ever since. It’s not provisional anymore, and it’s not afterlife. It’s more like extra life. It’s my extra life.

It changed me. I am changed. I’m not as strong as I was, and I have to write by hand now, which I love, because if I sit at the computer, it’s like balancing a bowling ball on my head. My neck will always be kind of weak. I have a massage therapist that comes twice a week, and he broke his neck in the same place. I asked him, “Is this ever going to go away?” He said, “Well, there are good days and there are bad days.” And so I got the answer.

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Q: You write in the book that some of the doctors and rehab center workers could be somewhat curt and abrupt, but it seems like you went out of your way to be compassionate to everyone you encountered in your journey.

I had one close moment with the neurosurgeon who told me to wear the neck brace. I was just leaving and nothing had changed, there was no improvement. And he suddenly called after me, “How many feet in a mile?” And I said, “5,280.” He was so impressed. I said, “Well, I went to a convent school, and the nuns made us memorize simply everything.” And he said, “Oh, my mother went to a convent school, and she had red hair just like mine, and they made her be Mary Magdalene every Christmas.”

Q: Oh, my God.

He was human, too.

Q: One of my favorite parts of this book is when you write about people that you have known, including yourself, who have been in what you call “the desperate place.” What would you say to people who are in that place now?

First, I’d say all those things at the beginning, like, “This is my life, and I may not get to do what I want in it.” They’re quiet, hard questions. I had to wait a long time to write this. I had to wait until everybody died. I love that piece of writing because it’s so true, and I don’t think there are many things like it. I wish I could write another one, but one is enough. One is enough.

I remember the way I got those questions. It was a long time ago, and I was sitting in a restaurant, and a man I knew came over. He’d had a lot of bad luck, and he sat down and had a drink, and he said, “You know what, Gail? Sometimes things don’t get better.” I remember that. It may not get better. It may not.

Q: What do you hope readers who’ve lost loved ones, or are maybe facing their own mortality, take away from this book?

Just more or less that you’re never going to know all the answers. You’re not going to know when it’s over for you. But meanwhile, you’re here and at least you can be kind to people and you can make their lives easier. The people close to you, people in town, you can make goodness work on a local level. That helped me a lot.