Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk

What would you do if, on the day your marriage ended, not long after the Recession put you out of work, your only parent called to tell you her deadly cancer was back?

Cameron Powell paused the collapse of his life and career to join his mother on a meaning-seeking romp across Spain – one sure to delight fans of Eat, Pray, Love, Bill Bryson, and Wild. This book’s collection of their travel-writing dispatches about the legendary Camino de Santiago, with a politically incorrect Spaniard, a theatrical Frenchwoman, and a 15-year-old “shirt-tail relative” is a hilarious hero’s journey of the first order. 

For three more years Cameron and his mother fought for her well-being, and when the bell finally tolled for her, and it was time to walk with her one last time, he wasn’t ready. What he didn’t expect was how the ordinary magic of love and meaning would armor them both against fear and despair.

As his mother lays dying, Powell writes, in real-time, and in the inimitable voice of a man seized by emotion, one of literature’s great love letters, sharing with us their “beautiful and excruciating last camino”, guiding us through the big questions and giving you-are-there breath to the work of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal -- while serving as an indispensable guide on how to die, and be there for dying others, not just well but meaningfully. 

By turns lyrical and meditative, ironic and compassionate, this deeply-felt memoir takes us, with wisdom, humor, and an overflowing tenderness, into one of the most challenging journeys true friends can ever take together, and opens up new insight into what it means to be a man. 

If you want see how you can show up for yourself and others, and create a life that lets you live with purpose and die with meaning, Ordinary Magic is for you.