The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

Ask: “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” 2. Don’t ask if there’s anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it’s not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don’t have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough.

“The thing is, you can’t just talk to people. We learned that. You have to work with people—that’s how you find out more about them. You can still be wrong. But you just know a lot more that way. That’s true no matter where you are.”

“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.