The gift of eternal love: brave author Mark Raphael Baker’s moving triumph over death

Mark Raphael Baker died of cancer last year. His family has ushered his stirring memoir toward publication.

Michelle Lesh and Raimond Gaita, who are the wife and stepfather-in-law of Mark Raphael Baker, at home in St Kilda, Melbourne. Picture: Alex Coppel

We are all going to die one day. ­Intellectually, we all know that. But there’s something very different about knowing, in an abstract way, that we are going to die, and facing death.

Writer, historian and teacher Mark Raphael Baker, formerly ­director of the Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, makes this distinction in a manner both deliberate and ardent in his beautiful new book, A Season of Death (MUP), which is to be published posthumously this week.

A Season of Death by Mark Raphael Baker

Baker, who died in May 2023, was newly married when he was told that he had cancer, and it was terminal. His youngest daughter Melila – her name derives from a biblical word in Deuteronomy for a sheaf of corn – wasn’t yet a year old. Knowing that he had little time, he began to write, completing the first draft in less than 12 weeks of what would become his last book.

His wife, Michelle Lesh, who is an international lawyer specialising in the laws of war, was a “a little shocked” when he gave it to her to read, because so much of it was so personal. She is, she affirms, a private person. Baker had written about the delightful way he wooed her, and how he’d encouraged her to fall in love with him, despite their age difference of 20 years.

He had written about the first time they made love, the marriage vows they made in front of friends and family, their IVF journey to pregnancy and the birth of their daughter; as well as his shock at ­realising that he would not get the 30 years with her that he had dreamed about.

He would die at 63.

Baker and Lesh on their wedding day

Lesh says: “Mark handed me the first version in June 2022 – he was diagnosed in April. To have my whole life out there was confronting but I knew he was doing it for our daughter, and for me.”

Baker continued to work on the book until four days before his death, and “in every important sense, the book was complete”, says his stepfather-in-law Raimond Gaita – himself an author, most famous for Romulus My ­Father – who has helped usher Baker’s memoir into the world.

“The reader will understand that Mark was facing his death and there were a few threads left hanging,” says Gaita. “These, we have tied up, but the book starts and ends exactly as he wrote it.”

Baker was the author of the much-admired Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about the death of his first wife, Kerryn Baker, who also died of cancer.

His decision to regroup, and ­remarry, was an act of faith in his own future.

Gaita says Baker’s last book raises the most important question, “what it is to face death?”.

“The fear of death is very primitive, and yet we are emotional and spiritual beings,” he says. “Mark wasn’t in denial. He knew he was going to die, and yet I think he ­believed that death is never fully understood until it happens, and perhaps not even then.”

Gaita says the book is truthful. “This is how he felt about his illness, his death, his family, all his children. And that is important. One day, Melila will read the book, and she will say to her mother, is this true? Was it like that? Did you love him, and did he love you, and me, the way this story tells it? And the answer will be yes, it is true. It is a true story of love.”