After beating breast cancer in her late forties, Eva Saulitis again faces the shadow, knowing this time the result will not end well. Saulitis revels in the nostalgia and secret pleasures that come from knowing it's all fleeting. She searches for answers from European poets and Buddhist scholars, from women in treatment chat rooms, from family, from routine; she looks out into the wilderness, at the salmon dying in the river without the ease of morphine, at stone structures broken from water freezing, expanding inside. Becoming Earth is the account of a woman living life in the presence of death, trying to make sense of a world that will keep going, even though she won't.

Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn to the majesty, intelligence, and range of emotion of a single pod of embattled orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Both an elegy for a small group of orcas and a celebration of the entire species, this book is a moving portrait of the interconnectedness of humans and marine mammals - and of the responsibility we have to protect them.