The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

If I’d waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.”

Of course you could do more—you can always do more, and you should do more—but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can. You just do your best, and that’s all you can do. 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—even if it’s just to sign something, or send a small contribution, or invite a newly settled refugee family over for Thanksgiving.”

So I tell these people to start by volunteering or giving money and then decide if they want to train to do this kind of work. But if they really want to help, then money is the quickest and fastest way, even if you can only afford a little.”

Then Mom added, with a smile, “And there’s something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don’t know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.”

How great, I thought, to honor people while they are still alive.

I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

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.

And a piece of advice that she thought was one of the most important things she wanted to pass on: You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.

If you believe in good, you also believe in evil, pure evil.”

There is no place more perfectly lonely than an airport at night when you fear someone you love is dying and you’re rushing to see that person.

All readers have reading in common.

looked in the book first at the Bible passage for that day. It was the shortest entry in the whole book, just three simple words: Thy Kingdom Come. Then I read the rest of the page. At the bottom was a quote from John Ruskin: If you do not wish for His kingdom, don’t pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it. I believe those were the last words Mom ever read.

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.

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.