The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  To deal with my looming insubordination, Mom devised a plan. She would have various friends take me to different kinds of services representing different Christian traditions. I could go to Sunday school at any church—my choice. But I had to choose one. I found it both bewildering and exciting—the way I would feel later during the first weeks of college, when you can shop for courses and try out different majors, imagining different lives for yourself: geologist, accountant, historian. I went to a Catholic service where they had a folksinger and preached what I later found out was liberation theology but at the time seemed a lot like what I was hearing every day at my very liberal grade school. I went to a Quaker meeting, which I quite liked despite the fact that the juice and cookies that they served were clearly substandard—homemade rather than delicious store-bought treats. Logic says I should have chosen the Unitarian Universalist Church, as it’s really church for people who aren’t committed to one path, but I didn’t. What I chose was the First Church of Christ Scientist. A local handyman who did work around our house and looked after us from time to time took me there. I don’t think Christian Science was what Mom had in mind—I think she thought I’d ultimately choose her church, which was Harvard’s and decidedly Protestant. But she was a good sport about it. She’d set up the rule; I’d followed it.

  The Christian Science Sunday school was a friendly place. The cookies were store-bought and of the highest quality. Tang—the very same drink the astronauts had in space, or so we were told—was served. We got a good overview of the most important Bible stories. And as for the principles of Christian Science—we got a basic grounding in them, and they made a fair bit of sense to me. But we were also told we were too young to choose a religion, so it was fine in the meantime just to learn some Bible stories and stop at that. I liked my independence. And I also think that I picked up on the fact that there was something a little bit daring about this religion—that many people regarded Christian Scientists with suspicion. It was fun to both follow the rules—I was going to Sunday school—and cast my lot with the outlaws. I think Mom got a little kick out of that, too, though not as big a kick as she would have gotten had I chosen her church.

  But religion didn’t stick with me, then or later. My boarding school was Episcopal, and we had to go to chapel five times a week. I enjoyed chapel fine, the organ music and the architecture, but felt, once I graduated, that having gone to church five times a week for four years meant I never had to go again. Also, there are just too many other places I want to be on Sunday morning: if not asleep in bed, then watching television, or reading, or having brunch with friends. I also developed an aversion to the part of the service where you’re supposed to turn to those around you, greet them warmly, and wish them peace. I felt like a phony when I did it. All that hugging and kissing and handshaking was too much for me.

  Mom adored warmly greeting her fellow men and women and wishing them peace. She loved the Scripture and the sermons and the music. But more than any of that, she believed. She believed that Jesus Christ was her savior. She believed in the resurrection and life everlasting. These weren’t just words to her. Her religion gave her profound pleasure and comfort. That’s what she wished for me.

  Quickly, Mom had started to steer our book club toward certain books where Christian faith played an important role. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, was one of her favorite books. Robinson had published a highly praised novel called Housekeeping in 1980 but no new novel for nearly a quarter century until this one. I would read it for the first time; Mom would read it again.

  Mom said she wanted me to read Gilead because of the writing and the vivid portraits of the characters and of the small fictional town of Gilead in 1950s Iowa where the story is set. And maybe also, I thought, because the novel is in the form of a letter that a dying parent, the town’s Congregationalist minister, writes to his son—though in the novel the child is just around seven years old. But mostly I suspected that she wanted me to read it because it’s a book that almost perfectly described her own faith. Mom was a Presbyterian, but she’d been married and had us baptized in a Congregationalist church. In the minister’s stories of the stormy relationship between his father and his grandfather, both preachers; of his battles with loneliness; and of his struggle with forgiveness over the behavior of the son of his best friend, the town’s Presbyterian minister, he presents a Christianity that allows him great solace as he contemplates his own death at the age of seventy-seven. It’s a book about living as a Christian in an America where injustice and racial intolerance still had and have sway; and it’s a book about grace and faith and what makes a good life. The minister’s final prayer for his son is simple but profound: “I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.”

  Mom said she had the same prayer for all of us.

  For Mom, the simple beauty of the prose was like the beauty of choir music or of the church itself. She knew I would appreciate that—and I did. Reading the novel, Mom said, was like praying.

  Mom took great comfort from praying—in church and out. She would talk with God and pray for all of us: for those she loved and knew and for those she didn’t know; for people who weren’t well and for people who had disappointed her—even for world leaders. I know she prayed for me because she told me so. And when people would say to Mom, “I’ll include you in my prayers,” it gave her great solace. It wasn’t a platitude for her—when she knew people were praying for her, it was something concrete and immense.

  One of Mom’s favorite passages from Gilead was: “This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?”

  She thought about this question, she said, as much as she could—whenever she met refugees, bus drivers, or new colleagues. She thought about it now when she went for chemo and met the nurses, her doctor, the woman who scheduled appointments, other people with cancer and their families. The answer was different for every person and every situation. But the question from Gilead, Mom said, was always the thing you needed to ask yourself: “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.

  Mom loved the pace of Gilead, which matched the rhythms of a church service, measured and deliberate yet full of passion. It’s a book that she felt allowed her to have her own thoughts and communion. Reading the book gave her another chance to talk with God.

  Some authors fill every inch of the canvas—everything is described and detailed; anything not mentioned doesn’t exist. Like a real-estate-listing writer, if something is worth saying, certain authors say it. (If a real estate listing doesn’t say “sunny,” you can bet the apartment is stygian dark; if it doesn’t say it has an elevator, it’s a walk-up; and if it doesn’t say “dry,” well then, a river runs through it.) Those “say everything” authors are usually more to my taste: Dickens and Thackeray and the Rohinton Mistry of A Fine Balance. Mom preferred authors who paint with few strokes. She loved abstract art, and I love figurative.

  It had taken me a good six or seven false starts before I was into Gilead. I just couldn’t, at first, get enough of a picture in my mind. What did the characters look like? How was the house decorated? More important, why weren’t there any adverbs! Mom, on the other hand, did not see those omissions as flaws. She had taken to it instantly and passionately and was delighted to be plunged back into it.

  The parts of the story I liked most had to do with the friend’s son: what he had done years ago and his situation now. But when we talked about the book, these parts weren’t what Mom most wanted to discuss.

  “Doesn’t the book make you want to have faith?” Mom asked me that day in D
ecember, after we had discussed Turtle and once she was settled into her chair and hooked up for chemo, following a long wait for a cubicle to become available.

  In Gilead, the narrator’s friend’s son describes himself not as an atheist but in “a state of categorical unbelief.” He says, “I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist, if you see what I mean.” I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views—I just didn’t think about religion. “And you wouldn’t want me to lie about it, would you?” I added.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom said, with a flash of annoyance. “That’s the last thing I’d want. But just as you can read this novel for the plot and the language, you can also go to church for the music and the quiet and the chance to be with other people and with your own thoughts.”

  Because we’d exhausted that topic, Mom decided to change the subject. “I had a wonderful time with Nancy,” she said. Nancy, my brother’s wife, had gone with Mom to chemo the time before. “That social worker, the young woman, came by with the survey again. The one for people with Stage Four cancer. They asked a lot of questions about faith, church, family. I told her how lucky I was—to have them all. And she asked if I was in pain, and I’m really not. Sure, I’m uncomfortable, and there are good days and bad days. But not pain. I’m not sure that’s what she wanted to hear.”

  “I think she just wants to hear whatever you want to say.”

  “It turns out that I’m going to be in the control group—the one that gets no counseling. So I’m done for a while. But it made me think—it’s time to ask the really big questions. I want you and your brother to come with me when we see the doctor next after the scan. That’s when we’ll know if the treatment is doing anything at all. If it isn’t, well, we’ll have some questions, and I want you both to be there when we get the answers—and then I’ll want you to call your sister in Geneva right after and my brother and tell them the news, whatever it is.”

  The one topic my mother and I had been avoiding was her death. Sure, we’d talked about death abstractly. We’d talked about the “death” of my stuffed turtle. We’d talked about Christianity, a religion steeped in death and resurrection; about the impending death of the minister in Gilead, how he’s very clear about the difference between wanting it, which he doesn’t, and accepting it, which he does; and about my friend Siobhan Dowd, a beautiful writer who discovered in her forties that she had an astonishing gift for children’s literature and wrote four and a half books before dying of cancer at age forty-seven, just four months earlier, in August of that year. And the news was full of stories and pictures of young men and women dying in Iraq. Sometimes it seemed like all we talked about was death. But the death we hadn’t yet discussed at all was hers.

  I needed to go back to The Etiquette of Illness and see what it had to say about this subject. There’s a big leap from “Do you want me to ask how you are feeling?” to “Do you want to talk about your death?”

  And even if I was to bring it up, how could I be sure she wouldn’t then talk about it because she thought I wanted to, even if she didn’t? But it would be worse if it was something she wanted to talk about, but we were all afraid to bring it up. What if our not talking about it was making her lonelier and robbing her of the chance to share not just her fears but her hopes—especially given that her religion is one of hope after death?

  I decided not to tackle the subject of death directly right then. Mom’s forty-eighth anniversary with Dad would be the next day. We would all have a small dinner together. My partner’s fiftieth birthday would be the following week, and we would be having a big banquet for David in a Chinese restaurant; Mom was determined to attend. Both meals were celebrations of the passing of time, sure, but also of life. Still, I didn’t want to ignore completely where we were or what was going on.

  “Mom, are you worried about the scan?”

  Mom’s face did display her natural smile, though slightly less than usual, as I think the mouth sores were still giving her a great deal of pain. We sat quietly for a while. She didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking or just trying not to speak. We’d done a lot of speaking, and it may have aggravated the sores. Her eyes were the same, but just a little duller. She still had that wonderful glow that drew people to her, but it was softer, more diffuse. Her hair was thinning, and her skin was thinner, with more spots, more lines. She was wearing a mandarin-collar shirt, one of many that David, a fashion designer, had made for her, but it now draped like a robe in a Goya court painting, fold on fold.

  What did I want to say? Did I want to say that I was desperately worried about the scan, that I feared it would be awful news, that we would need to stop talking about books and characters who died in books and turn to discussions of her dying?

  And then I had a brief moment of clarity as I looked over at her.

  “I have a feeling it’s going to be good news, Mom,” I said, lying. “But you know what I’m going to do to make sure?”

  She looked at me inquiringly.

  “I’m going to pray,” I said. “Well, not in a church. But I am going to pray.”

  I don’t know if Mom believed me, but she beamed. She’d been so pleased that my nonreligious cousins had prayed for her. And if heathen prayers were indeed the best of all, then mine should count big-time.

  That night and in nights to come, I did pray. For my text, I used something I’d read in Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, a book of autobiographical essays that’s funny and heartbreaking whether you’re a believer or not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are “Help me, Help me, Help me” and “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.” Sometimes I alternate. Mostly I use both. But I’m also not above asking for specific things—like a good scan and more time with Mom—whether anyone is listening or not.

  People of the Book

  It had been just over two months since Mom’s diagnosis, and we were sitting waiting for the result of the first scan she’d had after starting chemo, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to live her dying. Mom had indeed attended her and Dad’s anniversary dinner and was thrilled to be at David’s fiftieth-birthday banquet, even though she was feeling “not great” that day and had to leave before the toasts. Still, we didn’t know if she would have three months or six or a year or, if we were amazingly lucky, two, or if we we were miraculously lucky, five.

  Imagine that you had a book set aside for a long plane trip, but you didn’t know how long the book was. It might be as short as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or it might be as long as his The Magic Mountain, and you wouldn’t know until you came to the end. If it was Death in Venice, you might find that you’d raced through it and now had nothing to read for the rest of the flight. But if it was The Magic Mountain and you’d read sparingly so that the book would last the whole trip, you might discover you’d barely made a dent—and who knows when you would have the time to scale it again?

  We were going to have to learn how to pace ourselves—which routines we could keep and which we had to jettison; what we could try to cram in and what we had to give up; which occasions we would be sure to celebrate no matter what and which we would ignore; which books we were still going to read and which we would abandon; and even when we would focus on her dying and when we would talk about anything but.

  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.

  WALKING TO GET a second mocha, passing the television quietly thrumming with CNN’s latest news, I realize we will need some rules—or I will, at least, to help me navigate. When I get back to my seat, I pull out my iPhone and email
myself a note: “Celebrate Whenever Possible.” We are soon joined by my brother, Doug, who has just come from yoga. He is holding his trademark fedora hat, which he passes nervously from one hand to the other.

  “Greetings, Mr. Will,” he says, which is how he almost always addresses me.

  “Greetings, Mr. Doug,” I answer. “How are you doing?”

  “Excellent,” he says. “Yourself?”

  Doug and I, especially around Mom and Dad, tend to address each other less like brothers and more like two boarding school masters who have worked together for decades: a hearty blend of fond and formal. Mom smiles. I think there’s something reassuring about any family dynamic untouched by changing circumstances.

  Doug has morphed over the years from an easily excitable child into a much calmer adult. But like my father, sister, and me, he’s particularly talkative when anxious. It’s only Mom who grows quiet in times of stress. So Doug and I chat, mostly nonsense, filling airtime, and Mom listens.

  Then it’s time to go and see Dr. O’Reilly and get the results of the scan.

  WE LEAVE THE comfortable waiting room and walk through the white doors into an alternate universe, a sterile world where the comfortable chairs and sofas give way to plastic and metal, where the warm pine yields to polymers and laminates and steel, and where the lighting subtly shifts from incandescent to fluorescent.