Aging consciously

County writer draws on life experience in new book

Roz Bound has been writing for as long as she can remember. She learned to read and write when she was three years old, and now nearly eight decades late her love of writing remains as strong as ever, if not stronger. “I was an only child and had an imaginative mind, and I used to write a lot of stories,” she says. “Writing for me is a form of expression. Once the words start coming, you look at them when you’re finished and you think, ‘My Lord, where did that come from?’, and it’s a wonderful feeling.” As an adult, she spent 15 years in the Tropics, before moving back to Canada with her four children. She moved to the County some 20 years ago, which she says was her nineteenth move. Along the way, she earned a Bachelor’s degree while in her 50s, and then a Master’s degree in her 60s. She spent some time learning the art of spiritual healing, and she offered a succession of writing workshops, as well as publishing two books of poetry. The first book, Spirit of Lyme, was prompted by the summers she spent at a seaside resort in her native England as a child and to where she returned for a healing retreat in the early 2000s. “The retreat gave me a framework for doing what I’ve always done, to connect with people. It’s a form of healing where you use your intuition, a kind of spiritual healing,” she says. She launched the book in the resort town, and it is still sold in the local bookstore. He next book of poetry was also somewhat of a healing journey. Called Fireman’s Child, it is an exploration of her relationship with her father, who she describes as a “difficult man”. It was ultimately a journey of forgiveness. “I don’t know what came first, the poetry or the forgiveness,” she says. The book was launched on what would have the 100th birthday of her father, in December 2012.

Roz went on to complete a Doctorate of Ministry five years ago when she was 75, and her dissertation is the central part of her latest book Aging Consciously, Dying Awake. When working on her doctorate, she became interested in aging and what it meant for her on a personal level. “I realized I couldn’t write about aging, because I hadn’t really got there yet. I realized at that point most of my ideas about aging and dying had been made when I was younger, and because of that, it ended up being partly memoir, the different ways I learned about aging and dying,” she says. To make the change from an academic dissertation to a book suitable for the popular press, she had to recast it somewhat. She took out the footnotes and the references, and added a couple of chapters to make it an accessible reading experience. It is a collection of memoirs, stories, essays and poetry where the different pieces stand on their own, so the book does not have to be read cover to cover. She says the book is very different from other books about aging, many of which she found she could not connect to. “The books didn’t apply to me—what I call an ordinary woman living and ordinary life on a fairly limited income, with the potential for many years ahead of me and with the enthusiasm to keep on living. Those books were completely out of touch, I thought,” she says. “I’m a firm believer in body-mind-spirit. What I wanted to write is what is aging really like, rather than a how-to book. I went back to a lot of experiences in my life about aging, about dying, about the funerals I went to, and what I learned from all these. It’s not about looking and acting younger—I don’t believe in that. I talk about dying awake; I want to keep aware for the rest of my life, to pay attention to everything.”

The restrictions arising from the ongoing COVID- 19 pandemic allowed Roz the time to work on her new book. She didn’t want to go through the process of submitting the manuscript to a publisher, so she had the 263-page book printed by Printcraft. The original timeline was Spring 2022, but fittingly the first copies were delivered off the press on Solstice day in December. Roz made the announcement on social media, and already she has sold quite a few copies, locally as well as in the UK and US. Last week, she delivered a few copies to Books & Company in Picton, and she is planning an official book launch when conditions permit.