Diamond: A Memoir of 100 Days

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

After two years living in Vancouver, Dawn Rae Downton moves back to
Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in order to be closer to her best friend,
Carol. She and her husband B. buy Diamond Farm and begin the process of
settling in, only to learn within the first week that Carol has been
diagnosed with cancer. One hundred days later, Carol is dead.

Downton begins her memoir with the intention of marking her friend’s
final journey; indeed, Carol has told her she’s welcome to write about
this, and she spends a number of pages explaining to the reader just how
important it is that she get it right. But over the course of the
memoir, Downton devotes only a few pages to Carol. The rest of the work
is given over to treatises on diamonds and spiders, travels through the
countryside with B., plumbing problems in the farmhouse, local history,
and ducks.

By the end of the book, I realized that Downton’s intention was not
to give the reader a moment-by-moment account of her friend’s
experience with the disease that was killing her. Rather, her intention
was to make us understand that Carol died badly, full of anger, that her
death was hard—and for that, she needed only a few pages. The rest, I
think, is about Downton’s reaction to the situation. By extension, it
is an examination of how any human being survives when faced with the
worst kinds of loss. (You take care of the ducks. You upgrade your water
system. You make soup. You live.) This is what makes Diamond a brightly
polished gem in its own right.