The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

I reminded Mom of my second-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Williams. It was 1969, and she would say to us when we were noisy or aggressive, “Boys and girls, if we can’t get along with each other, then how are we ever going to get along with our brothers and sisters in North Vietnam?” Even as a second grader, I thought it sounded a bit naïve. But of course she was right.

People need to read the stories of these women—to learn how much effort went into getting the right to vote, so they won’t take it for granted.”

And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the headmistress that I had, indeed, managed to have it all—a husband, a career, three children—but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, ‘Oh, dear—did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!’”

Also, Mom told these young women that she didn’t have regrets about her work or her family life—that her friends with regrets were more likely to be the ones who hadn’t tried to do it all, who had devoted themselves solely to marriages that fell apart or to jobs that jettisoned them when they got to be a certain age.

I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it’s a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it’s a great choice to have a career. But I don’t entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others. I know lots of people don’t agree with me on that.”

No matter how tired I am, I can always read. But maybe that’s because of raising three children while working full-time. I think I got used to being tired all the time. If I’d waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.”

But as we were falling in love with Barbery’s building, we were also falling in love with her characters: Madame Michel, Monsieur Ozu, and Paloma, a jaded little girl bent on both committing suicide and also setting her apartment on fire before she turns thirteen. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, in many ways, a book about books (and films): what they can teach us, and how they can open up worlds. But it’s really, like most great books, about people—and the connections they make, how they save one another and themselves.

All through Mom’s illness, it was hard enough to persuade her to do something with the logic that it would help her—we often had to make a case for the greater public good. She liked the idea that someone else would be able to take part because she’d declined.

And I also realized that there was a different type of magical thinking—that certain things had to happen if Mom was to have the exit from life that she wanted. One of them was that Obama had to win the election. Another was that David Rohde had to come back safe.

But if a David Rohde could come back from near death, then maybe there was a future for the region and for us all. And if there was, then Mom could leave us all a more peaceful world than the one in which she’d lived. It would be easier for her to let go of life if she believed that everything would be okay. For Mom and David to meet again at a wedding was not just a miracle; it was a sign.

“I can’t see giving up real books,” she said. “And I love that I can give away my books after I’ve read them. Think of the first edition of The Magic Mountain I’m giving Nico. It was printed along with the first copy that went to Mann himself. It’s got a history.” “But electronic books are good for trips,” I said. “Yes, I can see that. And maybe for books you don’t want to keep.”

“I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.

When I asked Mom that night how she felt, she said, “A little guilty to be taking that much blood—but for fifty years I’ve donated blood to the Red Cross every time there was a blood drive, so I guess it’s okay if I take a little bit of it back.”

“This is of great importance, to watch carefully,—now I am so weak—not to over fatigue myself, because then I cannot contribute to the pleasure of others; and a placid face and a gentle tone will make my family more happy than anything else I can do for them. Our own will gets sadly into the performance of our duties sometimes” (Elizabeth T. King).

It’s not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a goodbye hug—but that only went through my mind later. It was a hug of genuine sweetness and affection: two people comforting each other, like sisters parting before one left on a long trip to a distant land.

“Everyone doesn’t have to do everything,” she told me. “People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I’ve had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

Mom showed me a section. It was a passage about a fifty-fifth high school reunion. It began: The list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony-cronehood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead. It continued: But we don’t see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children—the same round fresh faces, the same cup ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the locally bred swing bands that serenaded the blue-lit gymnasium during high-school dances.

Updike was dead. But when she read him, she read a book by that smart-as-a-whip classmate who was in her freshman seminar, and the truths that he had to impart about aging and relationships spoke to her.

What he’s seeking isn’t redemption but an invitation back into the world of people, “just the possibility of relief.”

One of Mom’s greatest fears was that she wouldn’t be able to read in the weeks leading up to her death, that she’d be too sick or too tired or unable to concentrate.

When she would say of a book like Big Machine that she’d read it in one sitting, it was both praise for the book and a way of letting all of us know that she was still herself, able to concentrate, stay awake, and be enthralled. As long as she could read books in one sitting, the end wasn’t quite in sight.

When I got home that night after dinner, I went right to sleep—but woke up in the middle of the night and read Too Much Happiness until dawn, skipping just the title story, or rather, saving it for later. Nita was nothing like Mom, other than the fact that they were both readers. But I could see why Mom loved that story the most. All readers have reading in common.

With Doug, she talked about the service she wanted. He also asked her if she had any regrets. She said she did have one: She’d always wanted a castle in Scotland. I don’t think this was delirium.

“You know,” Doug said, “think of it as a deal. If someone said to Mom, ‘You can die now, with three healthy children, your husband of almost fifty years alive and well, and five grandchildren whom you love and who love you, all well, all happy’—well, I think Mom would have thought that wasn’t a bad deal.”

She was surrounded by books—a wall of bookshelves, books on her night table, a book beside her. Here were Stegner and Highsmith, Mann and Larsson, Banks and Barbery, Strout and Némirovsky, the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible. The spines were of all colors, and there were paperbacks and hardcovers, and books that had lost their dust jackets and ones that never had them.

Eventually I came to realize that the greatest gift of our book club was that it gave me time and opportunity to ask her things, not tell her things.

I OFTEN THINK about the things Mom taught me. Make your bed, every morning—it doesn’t matter if you feel like it, just do it. Write thank-you notes immediately. Unpack your suitcase, even if you’re only somewhere for the night. If you aren’t ten minutes early, you’re late. Be cheerful and listen to people, even if you don’t feel like it. Tell your spouse (children, grandchildren, parents) that you love them every day. Use shelf liner in bureaus. Keep a collection of presents on hand (Mom kept them in a “present drawer”), so that you’ll always have something to give people. Celebrate occasions. Be kind.

I think Marina got it exactly right. Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to each other to begin with, and even after one of them has died.