The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do. Still, one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.

Mom was always a little amazed at parents who thought their kids should be reading more but who never read themselves.

Amen!

Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren’t aware of it.”

I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom’s dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come.

I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

“Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.”

I’d traveled across the world expecting people to meet me, instead of trying to meet them.

Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up—and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.”

Too many people use the excuse that they don’t think they can do enough, so they decide they don’t have to do anything. There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—

She hadn’t been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit—and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word escape used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

When I was finished, I looked around at Mom and Dad’s bedroom—and at Mom, resting relatively peacefully, but with that rasping breath that means there isn’t much time left. 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. They were Mom’s companions and teachers. They had shown her the way. And she was able to look at them as she readied herself for the life everlasting that she knew awaited her. What comfort could be gained from staring at my lifeless e-reader?

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.

Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better.

This! This is what I want my kids to know! We need to expose them to the hard and the struggles of others. But they need to know they can make a difference. They can do better. They can make change!

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.

you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do ...