The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  When Mom showed me the flowers and note, she burst into tears. It was the first time since she had gotten sick that I saw her do so. And then, just as suddenly, she brightened, and it was clear that she was going to be well enough for her seventy-fifth birthday. Soon the guests started to arrive. She stood the whole two hours and then some. She greeted everyone at the door and kissed everyone good night. She even went ahead with her plan to have a few sips of champagne. It was actually Dad who looked frailer that night—I suddenly noticed the physical toll all the stress and worry were taking on him.

  Maybe it was adrenaline or Ritalin or the antibiotics or the flowers or the energy in the room or sheer force of will, but Mom looked better that night than she had in months, and if you hadn’t known her, you never would have guessed that this was a woman a year and a half into treatment for pancreatic cancer, to whom the doctor had just said that all the usual treatments were now of no use. On the way out, a friend whose wife had died of cancer years before said to her, “This must be exhausting for you.”

  And Mom didn’t answer yes or no. She just smiled and said, “It’s my last party.”

  THERE WAS ONE moment of concern after the party was over—there were too many finger sandwiches left. In recent months, Mom had become almost hysterically concerned about any kind of waste, and looking at the trays of little sandwiches was making her miserable.

  I saw David and Nancy, my sister-in-law, whispering. Then they both approached Mom and asked her if she’d mind if we all took some of the sandwiches home.

  Crisis averted.

  THE NEXT DAY, when I called Mom, she said she’d had the most wonderful time. And her fever was gone.

  “What fever?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want you all to worry—but I had a fever of 102.”

  Girls Like Us

  When I was growing up, there was a television show called All in the Family that became famous for pushing social boundaries. One episode featured a riddle that stumped every character in the show—and just about everyone watching it. It went something like this:

  “A father and his son are in a terrible car crash. The father is killed instantly—but the son survives, barely, his life hanging in the balance. He’s rushed to the hospital and into surgery, but there’s only one doctor there, and as soon as the doctor sees the boy, the doctor says, ‘I can’t operate on my own son!’ How could this be, if the boy’s father was killed in the crash?”

  In 1971, when the show aired, people walked around for days trying to figure it out and created elaborate scenarios to explain it: “Maybe the father had an identical twin brother who thought he was the boy’s father …”

  Often as we walked into the office of Dr. Eileen O’Reilly, I thought back to that riddle. The doctor who said, “I can’t operate on my own son” was the boy’s mother, of course. Even today people still get stumped by this riddle.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE THE clock did seem to be ticking much faster and louder than it had over the past two years, we began to read many books at once. So even before we’d both finished The Bolter (a wonderfully quirky book that had just been published and told the true story of a woman who scandalously, frequently, and impulsively shook up her life in the early decades of the twentieth century in England and Kenya), we were on to a few others, one of which was George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play Saint Joan, in an edition that has the more-than-sixty-page preface Shaw wrote the year after the play opened.

  Shaw celebrates Joan as someone who “refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.” Mom pointed out to me a wonderful Shavian sentence in which he says that any biographer of Joan “must be capable of throwing off sex partialities and their romance, and regarding woman as the female of the human species, and not as a different kind of animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities.”

  My mother considered herself a feminist. As one of the first generation of women in America who worked by choice and not necessity (not counting the women a few years older, the Rosie the Riveters who kept the factories humming, and worked due to a combination of choice and necessity), she was aware of the trailblazers of her generation who had made these advances possible and was proud to have been, in her own way, one of them, racking up a collection of “firsts”—the first woman president of the Harvard Faculty Club, the first woman director of admissions at Harvard and Radcliffe. My father is a feminist too, though he would most likely describe himself as a social anarchist, someone who believes that all people should be free to do as they like. Mom and Dad agreed on both the ends and the means—but he was less interested in discussing the specific rationale.

  Idina Sackville, the Bolter, was, according to Frances Osborne, her biographer and great-granddaughter, passionately, though not violently, devoted to the campaign for Votes for Women. Osborne writes “Idina was not a militant suffragette. Instead her East Grinstead, England, organization was a signed-up branch of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), which believed that women’s suffrage should be achieved by peaceful means.” But this didn’t stop the members of this organization from being menaced by

  a mob of fifteen hundred anti-suffragists marching against them, hurling “pieces of turf, a few ripe tomatoes and highly seasoned eggs,” reported the East Grinstead Observer.

  The first house the suffragists sheltered in was charged by the mob and its front door slowly and steadily bent until it cracked. The police dragged the women out the back to the branch’s headquarters at the top of the Dorset Arms pub, where they were trapped for several hours, listening to the crowd outside continuing to bay for their blood.

  It was the only violent outburst in the entire six-week campaign, but Idina and her mother’s involvement in the group was enough to confirm society’s unfavorable opinion of Idina.

  Both my parents loved The Bolter—my father mostly because he’s always been obsessed with that period. For Mom, it was the era and the fact that it was the story of such a strong woman: the kind that she could relate to on an almost personal level. Mom read books by and about women whenever possible.

  I’m not sure how she found her way to Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience by Susan Pedersen, but that’s what we read next. Rathbone was a British feminist and parliamentarian, and Mom was fascinated by this new biography—the political journey and also the parts that spoke of Rathbone’s four-decade relationship with another woman. When I asked her what in the biography impressed her most, she answered:

  “She had to figure out a life for herself. Nothing was handed to her—personally or professionally. There was no path. And it’s just fascinating to see how much work—how much organizing and planning—went into the suffrage movement. I think too many young women take that for granted, and it just makes me so cross when I see young women who’ve had every opportunity and then I find out they can’t be bothered to go and vote. People need to read the stories of these women—to learn how much effort went into getting the right to vote, so they won’t take it for granted.”

  Oddly, we both simultaneously discovered our next book, which continued the theme of reading about women’s lives: Girls Like Us by the journalist Sheila Weller, a book about the singer-songwriters Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. I’d never known Mom to be a particularly big fan of the music of any of these women—though I think she liked them all, and I can recall her humming along with “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Both Sides Now” if they came up on the radio—and I believe my sister listened several thousand times to Carly Simon and James Taylor singing “Mockingbird,” and that was also a favorite of Mom’s. These women weren’t of her generation; they were an important decade younger, born at or near the end of World War II as opposed to growing up during it. But Mom was interested in their lives with the same big-sisterly affection she lavished on the younger women with whom she had worked.

  Mom felt that a special burden had been placed on the women of the generation th
at followed hers; because they were the first to have certain opportunities and choices, theirs hadn’t been an easy road. Weller writes about the “hurt, anger, and heightened self-regard shared by female age mates whose elevated expectations had left them unwilling to be pushed aside in the same ‘due course’ of life that had bound earlier generations of women.” Because Mom was in the first generation to make a new kind of life—one with marriage and children and a career—she said she’d really been too busy to stop and think about what kind of expectations she’d had, if any.

  “I do think back,” Mom told me, “on my wonderful headmistress at Brearley, the one who told us we could have everything we wanted. She always said, ‘Girls, you can have a husband and a family and a career—you can do it all.’ And when you three children were little and I was trying to go to all your school events—and make things for your bake sales—and do my full-time job—and look after you when you were sick—and look after your father—and cook dinner—and make sure the house was tidy—and everything else, I would think about what we’d been told as girls and just keep on going, even though I was exhausted so much of the time. And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the headmistress that I had, indeed, managed to have it all—a husband, a career, three children—but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, ‘Oh, dear—did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!’ ”

  Mom made a point of telling this story to the young women who came to her for advice, but she also made sure they knew that help could come in many forms—an extended family, a stay-at-home spouse, or friends who were willing to pitch in, for example, in addition, of course, to any hired helpers a family might be able to afford.

  Also, Mom told these young women that she didn’t have regrets about her work or her family life—that her friends with regrets were more likely to be the ones who hadn’t tried to do it all, who had devoted themselves solely to marriages that fell apart or to jobs that jettisoned them when they got to be a certain age.

  ON TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2009, Mom and I found ourselves again in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, so the book club was in session. Mom’s feet were swollen, her ankles bulging out above her flats. I asked her if she was in pain.

  “No,” she said. “Not pain. Just uncomfortable.”

  This day was important for two reasons—it was the fourth birthday of Mom’s youngest grandchild, Cy, and at the appointment Mom would find out if she qualified for any experimental treatments.

  Before we were called into Dr. O’Reilly’s office, I asked Mom if she remembered the All in the Family riddle. “Of course,” said Mom. “I think that did a lot to change people’s attitudes. Even people who thought they were very progressive were alarmed when they realized they’d spent hours puzzling it out, assuming without question that a doctor must be a man.”

  I had been thinking about the women in Girls Like Us, and about the women who were my contemporaries, and their daughters. “Did you ever think things would come as far for women as they have in your lifetime?”

  “Sure I did,” she said. “All you had to do was see the extraordinary young women at college in the sixties and seventies—nothing was going to hold them back. And it was an exciting time—there were so many discussions and meetings and books. But I do worry now that people don’t understand how much is at stake. I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it’s a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it’s a great choice to have a career. But I don’t entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others. I know lots of people don’t agree with me on that.”

  I was about to say something when Mom began again, on a slightly different topic.

  “But I also don’t approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don’t work—maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best thing anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other—and no one has a monopoly on teaching that.” I had a feeling that Mom had said this many times and to many young women. But while she was telling me, color came back into her face, and I got a strong sense that she was not yet ready to call it quits. She had more she wanted to do.

  And so did Dr. O’Reilly.

  When we were called into the office, Dr. O’Reilly was already there. She leaned against the examining table across from Mom and told us the good news first. Mom’s tests had revealed that the most recent bacterial infection was gone—so the antibiotic had worked. There would be ultrasound for Mom’s feet, to make sure there was no blood clot, but a simple diuretic should reduce the swelling. The abdominal discomfort was gastrointestinal and not directly related to the cancer. Nor was Dr. O’Reilly overconcerned about the fever.

  “As for treatment …” Dr. O’Reilly began. Then she paused, though her eyes didn’t leave Mom’s. “Well, I think some of the experimental treatments may need to be ruled out, because you would need a new biopsy just to see if you qualified. We made the original diagnosis off a sample that’s too small to stain. A new biopsy might be rough on you. So I don’t suggest that.”

  “No,” said Mom right away, “I don’t want a new biopsy. I definitely don’t want that.”

  “But there are some promising trials, and you might fit the criteria for those, so I’ll put you on the list, and if you meet the criteria and space opens up, well then, you can decide later. In the meantime, I think we should try mitomycin—it helps slow the growth of tumors in some people who’ve been through many different courses of treatment, as you have. It’s just going to be one treatment a month, and we’ll try it for two or three months while waiting to see if a spot opens up in one of the trials.” Dr. O’Reilly then described all the usual chemo side effects: nausea, mouth sores, hair loss, fatigue. But Mom shrugged them off—she was used to them by now.

  The next scan would be in two months.

  “How are you feeling?” Dr. O’Reilly asked. “Is your appetite coming back? Are you very tired?”

  “I’m trying to eat as much as I can,” Mom said. “But nothing tastes good. So I eat a lot of Jell-O. I still have enough energy to see friends and go to afternoon concerts and read. No matter how tired I am, I can always read. But maybe that’s because of raising three children while working full-time. I think I got used to being tired all the time. If I’d waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.”

  Suite Française

  When we talked about anything other than Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française that next week, we found our conversation constantly moving back to it.

  Mom had another doctor’s appointment, so I met her in the waiting room as always. On this particular day, we had to sit on the long sofa in front of the windows, as every chair was taken. Before a holiday weekend, people are keen to squeeze in another course of chemo.

  “So, any news from The Angels?” asked Mom. “The Angels” was my shorthand for a group of angel investors who had expressed some interest in the cooking site. They had been on the verge of funding it for months. I was getting down to my last dollars.

  “Nothing.” We both looked down at our copies of Suite Française. “Did you find space for the Afghan project?”

  “No. You would think with the way the economy is, someone would be able to rent us a desk.”

  “You would think.”

  “I’m going to close my eyes for second,” Mom said after a pause, but she didn’t.

  “Okay, I’ll read a bit.”

  “Where are you in the book?” Mom asked.

  “I’m just at the part where the son has run off to join the French arm
y.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” Mom said. And then she closed her eyes.

  Long prior to her cancer and its brutal treatment, when we were growing up, whenever Mom “closed her eyes,” it was never completely clear to us if she was sleeping, meditating, or simply and quite literally closing her eyes. So we exercised caution, as it always seemed that she would open her eyes just in time to catch us in the middle of doing or saying something we shouldn’t.

  Mom kept her eyes closed, and I read on, eager to see what was going to happen to our boy soldier and suspecting the worst. After a little while, I noticed Mom’s eyes were again open.

  “I agree,” I said. “He shouldn’t have run off to join the soldiers. It was clearly futile—France was lost! And he had no training, so he could only get in the way.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mom said. “The reason he shouldn’t have gone is that he was a child and children shouldn’t fight in wars. When I read that part, I kept thinking about Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone. And about the child soldiers in Burma.”

  Mom closed her eyes a few minutes more, then continued: “And our lack of empathy is astonishing, When parents look at photographs of their children, can they imagine them with real guns in their hands, killing? They see them with toy light sabers and water pistols, but what about with machetes and Kalashnikovs?”

  Still, even the dramatic incongruity of a child with a real weapon doesn’t tell the full story, because Mom had also seen how thin the veneer of civilization is and can be, that it doesn’t take the most extreme situations for order to break down. We talked not just about Beah and Eggers but also again about Lord of the Flies, the ultimate work about how quickly people can become savage and cruel. And how deep the scars are then for everyone and how long they last.