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We walked together to the porch, and then Nico joined the crew so I could get a picture of Mom with all five of her grandchildren. I’m not sure why I felt compelled at that moment to do it. I never take photographs. Maybe I sensed that something was about to happen beyond the control of love, patience, or any of us, and this was my last chance to fix time.
Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confused or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself; television jangled her nerves.
The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
always asking questions in case there was something useful she could learn, or perhaps just because she was much more comfortable in the role of the comforter than the comforted.
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.
Wouk is the kind of popular writer who is always teaching you something, but who knows how to tell a story and involve you in the lives of his characters. Both are also much better prose stylists than critics often acknowledge.
He was the smartest and best-read person any of us had ever known, but he wore his learning so lightly and had such curiosity about other people that he had the ability to make everyone around him feel smart and well-read.
He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you,
in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it’s been since you turned the last page.
“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.”
When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.”
asked her to name some of the writers who had changed the course of her life. “There are so many,” Mom said right away. “I wouldn’t know where to start. Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life,
“Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs.”
“Of course,” said the Queen, “but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”
“Pass the time?” said the Queen. “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included.
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.
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.
“Well, I don’t think it’s any sadder to die from cancer than from a heart attack or another disease or an accident or anything else. It’s all just part of life, real life. If we ruled out books with death in them, we wouldn’t have much to read.”
it’s important to read about cruelty.” “Why is it important?” “Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley
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Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”
joked with my brother that I wished I could be a little more prodigal. He assured me that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
It’s being present in the moment. When I’m with you, I’m with you. Right now. That’s all. No more and no less.
That there’s great joy in thanking.
John Irving reading A Prayer for Owen Meany, one of Mom’s and my favorite books, pure magic.) And what’s worst about most literary events—almost no author knows when to stop reading and sit down.
“I don’t want any of you to be sad when I’m not here anymore. But I do want you to look after each other.
Mom had made it very clear that she was living while dying and that whatever time she had left was not to be turned into a rolling memorial.
“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.”
Everyone is looking for a return to something—
but it’s clearly impossible to go back.
