The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

Maugham’s parable is a retelling of a classic Iraqi tale. The speaker is Death: There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

In it is a description of a painting by Brueghel, in which the old master depicts Icarus falling from the sky while everyone else, involved in other things or simply not wanting to know, “turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster” and goes about daily tasks.

Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn’t decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled but the road with the exit ramp.

1. 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.

Permanent is not. Impermanent is not.

“That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”

I told Mom a joke I’d heard ages before about an Englishman at the time of the Crusades who leaves a prescription off at a pharmacy in London and then goes to fight against the infidels. He’s captured, is eventually released, falls in love, and lives for thirty years in Persia. Eventually he decides to come home to England and, once back, finds in his pocket the receipt for the prescription. Miraculously, the London pharmacy still exists, and the same pharmacist is behind the counter. He hands over the receipt; the pharmacist looks at it and says, “It’s not quite ready yet—can you come back at five?”

“The world is complicated,” she added. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”

“What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.

In the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are “Help me, Help me, Help me” and “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.”

Of course, we are all dying and none of us knows the hour, which could be decades away or tomorrow; and we know that we need to live our lives to the fullest every day. But I mean, really—who can play that mental game or live like that? And there’s a world of difference between knowing you could die in the next two years and knowing that you almost certainly will.

“Just imagine that you are awakened tonight by someone in your family who says to you, ‘Put the things you treasure most in one small bag that you can carry. And be ready in a few minutes. We have to leave our home and we will have to make it to the nearest border.’ What mountains would you need to cross? How would you feel? How would you manage? Especially if across the border was a land where they didn’t speak your language, where they didn’t want you, where there was no work, and where you were confined to camps for months or years.”

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. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.

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.

write, secretly, in small rooms, in the hidden chambers of their minds, just as people whisper the words they’re forbidden to speak aloud.”

It’s easy to forget in our wired world that there are not just places like prisons where electronic text is forbidden, but whole countries, like Burma, where an unregistered modem will land you in jail or worse. Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has.

“Whatever beings there are, may they be free from suffering. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from enmity. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from hurtfulness. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from ill health. Whatever beings there are, may they be able to protect their own happiness.” “I particularly like that last phrase,” Mom said. “About protecting your own happiness.” “But how can you protect your own happiness when you can’t control the beatings?” I asked. “That’s the point, Will. You can’t control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness. As long as he can, well then, he still has something worth living for. And when he’s no longer able, he knows he’s done all he can.” In my mind, I replaced the word beatings with cancer.

In the novel, Kitty is first told to consider the beauty of the nuns’ lives as perfect works of art, no matter what comes after. Then she’s asked to consider a symphony concert, where each musician plays his own instrument, content to add to a symphony that’s no less lovely whether or not there is anyone to hear it. And finally she’s told to contemplate the Tao:

As a reader, you’re often inside one or more characters’ heads, so you know what they’re feeling, even if they can’t exactly say it, or they say it so obliquely that the other characters don’t catch it. Readers are frequently reminded of the gulf between what people say and what they mean, and such moments prod us to become more attuned to gesture, tone, and language. After all, we each reveal ourselves through a dizzying number of what poker players call “tells”—verbal and visual clues that display true intention to anyone observant enough to notice them. Mom was a reader and a listener. When would it be time for Mom to stop the treatments? I thought back to her exact words. She hadn’t answered me by saying that she was sure the doctor would “tell” us. What Mom had said was that she was sure the doctor would “let us know.” The important

thing was to pay attention.

“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.”

Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize that someone made that chair, and someone sold it, and someone delivered it—and you are the beneficiary of all that. Just because they didn’t do it especially for you doesn’t mean you aren’t blessed to be using it and enjoying it.

The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.

“We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person—it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant—so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. 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.”

But sometimes you just can’t know what’s going to happen, even when you know everything there is to know. So you prepare for the worst but hope for the best.”

Mom was both dying and living.

This is one of the main themes of the book. Also it is often the most difficult for those of us who will eventually be left behind to focus on and enjoy with them...they are still here. They are still living. Allow them to do that to whatever capacity they are able and celebrate those moments with them. Don’t mourn them before they are gone

I realized I could share by talking about anything Mom wanted to discuss, or by sitting quietly with her, reading. And I could acknowledge without probing or dwelling or fixating.

“And one other thing. I’m really trying to make it clear to people that if they’re going to cry all the time, then they can’t come over. I’m getting ready, but I’m still here.”

joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

“Some people are nice … and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”