The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  I told Mom how lonely I was when I first moved to Hong Kong (I’d gone on a whim), right after college, before I met David there. And how I woke up one day and realized that I’d traveled across the world expecting people to meet me, instead of trying to meet them.

  How can you be lonely, Mom said, when there are always people who want to share their stories with you, to tell you about their lives and families and dreams and plans? But now she couldn’t stop thinking about David Rohde and how lonely he must be, separated from his wife, from his books, and, she feared, from anyone who wanted to share their stories with him or hear his.

  The Price of Salt

  The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith, first appeared in 1952 under a pseudonym and would sell more than a million copies. Highsmith (according to her afterword), then age thirty, wrote it after her first novel, Strangers on a Train, a novel of suspense, was bought for film by Alfred Hitchcock. Her publisher wanted another book exactly like her first; The Price of Salt is a suspense novel, in a way, so she fulfilled the essential task, but it’s also a lesbian love story. It was rejected by her original publisher and picked up by another house. Highsmith would soon go on to write the Ripley novels for which she’s now best known. I’d seen the movie made from The Talented Mr. Ripley but never read a word of Patricia Highsmith. Mom loved her work but had never read this one.

  In December 2008, I had the book with me while we waited for Dr. O’Reilly. Mom had already finished it. Every time I put the book down to go grab some mocha, or check my email, or make a call, I returned to find Mom rereading it, sneakily wolfing down passages as though I’d left behind a bag of cookies, not a book, and she was scooping up crumbs behind my back

  The Price of Salt begins with a young woman named Therese who wants to be a theatrical set decorator but is instead working as a temporary saleswoman at a department store, in the doll department—just as Highsmith herself had. She’s lonely and listless. She has a boyfriend she doesn’t love. She spends a depressing evening with an older woman who is also in sales at the store, which gives her a sad glimpse of what her life might become.

  “When you walk around New York,” Mom said when we started to discuss it, “or really anywhere, you see so many people like that young woman—not desperate but still sad and lonely. That’s one of the amazing things great books like this do—they don’t just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.”

  In the novel, customers come and go, but suddenly one says to Therese two words that will change both their lives: “Merry Christmas.” None of the other patrons have bothered to greet her: she’s just a shopgirl behind a counter. But a beautiful, charismatic married woman utters these two kind words of greeting—“Merry Christmas”—and sets Therese on a journey—and a road trip—where she’ll find herself and, actually, love.

  After reading this passage, I put the book down and started to think about the way Mom acknowledged people. Everyone who came into her little chemo cubicle got a warm look-you-in-the-eye greeting or thank-you—the nurse who brought the juice, or fetched a shawl, or remembered the pillow Mom liked under her arm, or checked the chemo to make sure that the numbers matched, or just came in to brusquely fuss with a machine; the same went for the receptionist who scheduled the appointments, and the gentlemen stationed outside the building who opened the door for everyone who came in or went out.

  The thank-you thing had been drummed into us intensely when we were growing up. We had three great-aunts, on my mother’s side, who believed that when they dropped a present in the mail, your thank-you note should essentially bounce right back out of the mailbox at them. If it didn’t, the whole family, cousins and second cousins and all, knew about your lack of gratitude (and, come to think of it, common sense, as the threat was always that no more presents would be forthcoming, ever), and you heard about it from multiple sources. The notes couldn’t be perfunctory, either—you had to put real elbow grease into them, writing something specific and convincing about each gift. So Christmas afternoon meant laboring over thank-you notes. As children, we hated this task, but when I saw Mom beam as she thanked people in the hospital, I realized something she had been trying to tell us all along. That there’s great joy in thanking.

  In The Price of Salt, the Christmas at the start of the novel turns out to be a momentous time for Therese. In our family, Christmas was always a big deal, and appropriately joyful, but not without stress. I remember vividly the year there almost was no Christmas.

  I think I was eight, which would have made my brother nine and my sister four. We were living in a bulbous shingle-style house on a handsome Cambridge Street. Very Currier & Ives. I’m sure it was snowing, because it seemed like it was never not snowing in Massachusetts in December. (The song “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” was a mystery to me growing up, as I knew nothing else.) We almost certainly had a fire. Stockings would have hung in front of it. And we would have been sitting in the living room, surrounded by books and the tree, which towered over the presents that were already there, with more to come from Santa later.

  We were probably a little cold whenever we moved away from the fire, as Dad believed in sweaters in lieu of heating and kept the house somewhere between freezing and frozen.

  Every year Mom would read the Christmas story to us right before it was time for bed. She would sit in an armchair by the fire, her legs tucked up underneath her, Nina beside her, and Doug and I on a low bench with a needlepoint cushion. (She had done the needlepoint.)

  This year, as always, Mom began to read: “And so it came to pass that in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus …”

  Because of my decades in publishing, I’ve been to a lot of readings. I loathe most of them. I loathe the phony, singsong reading voice that most writers adopt, a kind of spooky incantatory tone that implies they are reading a holy text in a language you don’t understand. (Of course there are exceptions—Toni Morrison, Dave Eggers, David Sedaris, Nikki Giovanni, 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.

  But Mom had a lovely reading voice, both because she was my mother and because she really did, and actually spoke when she read. Maybe it was her training in London as an actress. I think she was proud of her reading. Her voice became a bit more mid-Atlantic. She read loudly and clearly.

  So Mom was reading; the fireplace was glowing; we three children were all around her. And then one of us started to giggle. I’m not even sure which one of us it was. Well, truthfully I am, but even after all these years it would seem like ratting out a sibling to name a name. Mom continued. It wasn’t even clear that she’d heard or noticed, but maybe she had and was determined not to break the mood.

  Then another of us started to giggle, and then the third. We knew we shouldn’t and thought we couldn’t help ourselves. We weren’t laughing at anything in particular. We were just laughing from high spirits, silliness, anticipation—who knows, probably all three. The more we tried to stop, the more we giggled. Then we were laughing simply because we were laughing.

  And then we weren’t. The Bible was slammed closed. The air went out of the room. We’d almost never seen Mom so mad.

  “Maybe this year there won’t be a Christmas.”

  THERE WAS INDEED a Christmas that year, as there always had been, but I recall an extremely anxious and suspenseful night—not just over presents, though I’m sure that I worried they would all be gone, but over genuine regret at having ruined Christmas Eve and fear of the anger we’d brought out in our mother.

  “Do you remember when we laughed at the Christmas story and you sent us all to bed?” I asked this of Mom while we were discussing The Price of Salt.

  Some memories evoke smiles. This one didn’t.

  You piece together your parents’ child-raising theories by analyzin
g later why they did what they did. One of the many great things about having siblings is that you get to do this in a communal, Talmudic way. After my sister and I talked about it as adults, we came to some conclusions:

  1. Mom thought that even small children needed to be taught the responsibility that comes with speech and to learn that words, laughter, and even glances can have consequences.

  2. Mom thought that religion was not something to mock, even though she believed that there should be no prohibition from doing so.

  3. Mom was not a big fan of silliness.

  4. The written word, on the page or read aloud, was to be accorded the utmost respect.

  I remember one of the few other times I saw Mom that furious. It was when I, at age nine, at the urging of a mischievous older child and not understanding what it was, gave myself a Magic Marker tattoo of a swastika on my arm. Mom was shaking with anger as she struggled to get me to understand the history behind it and what the effect would be on our friends who had lived through the Holocaust, or had family who died in it, should they see me with this evil symbol on my skin. Mom scrubbed my arm down to the bone, or so it felt—there was no way I was leaving the house until every trace of it was gone.

  “ARE YOU SPENDING the holidays with your family?” strangers would ask me this December, as strangers do. People who knew me would ask, naturally, both that question and also inquire how Mom was doing. When faced with the query about my mother, I could refer people to the blog—still written in my voice by Mom. But usually I just said, “Not bad at all, all things considered,” or something like that. And then I added what was true: “And she’s just thrilled to have all the grandchildren around.” If people knew me even better, they might ask, “And how are you doing?” That always stumped me, so I’d answer the way I thought Mom would want me to answer. “We’re just so lucky—to have such great care, and to have more time than anyone would have dared hope for.”

  I did start to notice something, however: a difference in tone when this last question was asked by someone whose mother or father or both had recently died, especially of cancer. It was as if we were reading the same book, but one of us had gotten ahead of the other: they’d made it to the end, and I was still somewhere in the middle. The “How are you doing?” was really “I think I may know how you are doing.”

  Most of the time, however, even the simplest exchange around the topic of how I was feeling about Mom’s health seemed forced and awkward and uncomfortable, so I found myself changing the subject as quickly as possible. The awkwardness had lots of causes: She was dying but not dead—so allowing or expressing too much grief made me feel and sound as though I already had her in the grave, prematurely, and had given up all hope of more time. She wasn’t the first person to be dying, nor was I the first adult to be losing a parent, so on top of not wanting to sound prematurely morbid, I felt unseemly if I thought I was talking excessively about it. And more than anything, we are a pretty awkward society when it comes to talking about dying. It’s supposed to happen offstage, in hospitals, and no one wants to dwell on it too much.

  There’s also still a schoolyard stigma to being perceived as overly attached to your mother. I think it’s far less pronounced today than it was when I was growing up, but it’s still there. Most of the men I know freely admit to loving books about sons coming to terms with the lives and legacies of their fathers—books like Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert and The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff and The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. But those same men are a little more embarrassed about loving books like The Color of Water by James McBride or The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer, maybe talking about the first in terms of what it says about race and the second for its depiction of the joys of bar life, when both books, really, at their hearts are about the fierce bond between a mother and a son. The subject is regarded, frankly, as a bit gay—the terrain of a writer like Colm Tóibín or Andrew Holleran. Maybe some of that, too, was at work and kept me from feeling comfortable discussing my emotions, my grief.

  So I tended to answer yes, I’m spending the holiday with family; Mom is doing remarkably, all things considered; and I’m just fine.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas 2008, Mom took her grandchildren to her church (they were all in town for the holidays), where the youngest ones sat transfixed on the floor in front of the altar as the minister told the Christmas story. No one, thank God or goodness, laughed. My brother and Nancy hosted the Christmas Day dinner. We had, as always, homemade plum pudding for dessert. For more than one hundred years, every single year, all the women in Mom’s family had gathered to make plum pudding using the precise instructions in a handwritten family recipe. Mom had participated more than sixty times in this ritual and had done so again this year, but with a difference: this year, at Mom’s suggestion, for the first time ever, the men had been invited. She’d wanted her grandchildren there, and if the boys were coming, then the men could come too.

  New Year’s Eve was quieter than Christmas, celebrated early in the evening at Mom and Dad’s house with a big tub of caviar sent by friend who had been a student of Mom’s; we were her host family when she arrived from Iran to attend Harvard. Mom had always told her students that she would look after them in high school and college—but that they could buy her meals when they were adults. They were doing all that and more, and the apartment was filled with cards and presents from her former students.

  It was natural on New Year’s Eve for Mom to talk about how miraculous it was that she was here for a second New Year’s Eve following her diagnosis, how lucky she was, and how grateful. Then she said something I hadn’t heard her say before:

  “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. I’ll be very cross if I hear that any of you are fighting. And if anyone causes trouble, I’ll come back from the grave and get ’em.”

  AS USUAL, MOM had given a lot of Christmas presents, including bags made by Burmese refugees to the doctors, nurses, and staff at the hospital. For me, she and Dad had chosen vintage Steuben lowball glasses for the Dewar’s I like to drink at cocktail time. When the holidays were over, I sat down to write them a thank-you letter—not on Christmas afternoon, as I had been trained, but soon after. I found it more difficult than I had anticipated: I wanted to thank them for so much more than the glasses that the letter kept ballooning out of control. Each draft sounded more and more like a eulogy for my mother. 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. And yet how many more chances would I have to thank her for what she’d done for me and taught me and given me?

  What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn’t the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn’t what you give in exchange for something; it’s what you feel when you are blessed—blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.

  Kabat-Zinn’s books and the concept of mindfulness sprang to mind—but so did a book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude. The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. 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 righ
t in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.

  I pulled out a fresh piece of paper and began my thank-you note anew with the following words: “Dear Mom and Dad. I am so lucky …”

  The funny thing was, the more I thought back on all the blessings, the more grateful I felt, and the less sad. Mom, like David K. Reynolds, was a Japanese psychotherapist at heart.

  While I was writing this book, I came across my copy of The Price of Salt. And I found a piece of writing paper with a letter Mom had written: “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.”

  I have no idea how that letter got there.

  The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Many people dropped off books for Mom. She’d already read most of them, but she never said so to the gift giver; she thought that was impolite. If someone gave her any gift that was a duplicate of something she already had, she would give it to someone else, not tell the generous giver that the thing was redundant. Certain ARBs (Already Read Books) came in multiples over Christmas. She would write a nice thank-you and pass the duplicates on—to a friend, to a nurse—or leave them on a book-swap table in her building.