The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  There would be more visits to the hospital—the C. diff. would return with a vengeance. There would be a tumble in front of two of the grandchildren—Mom would be okay but shaken and worried at having scared them. Another time she would fall, late at night, in the apartment—my father would need to summon first a neighbor and then the building’s porter to help lift her off the floor. There would be a fund-raiser for the Afghan project, hosted by an IRC friend of Mom’s whom she’d drafted to the library cause, that would bring in more than $25,000, an evening for which Mom had helped sweat every detail. There would be the hunt for a first edition of Mann’s The Magic Mountain to give Nico for his summer birthday. There would be more concerts and movies, and more meetings of our two-person book club.

  And there would be a miracle.

  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

  Mom was on a bus on June 21, 2009, when she got a cell phone call about the miracle from our friend Andy, who was now also serving on the Afghan library board. “Have you heard the news?” he asked. Their fellow board member David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who had been taken captive by the Taliban and for whom Mom had been praying, had managed to escape along with an Afghan journalist who had been captured with him. After seven months in captivity, they were safe. No one yet knew the details—just that they’d somehow managed to break free of their captors and find their way to safety. Mom told me she couldn’t stop smiling even as she sobbed all the way home on the bus. The only other time during her last two years when a piece of news had made her so happy, she said, was when Obama was elected. As soon as she was home, Mom’s first response was to call her minister. “The prayers helped!” she said. “You can take ‘David’ off the list.”

  Several weeks later, Mom and Dad made a long day trip to be at the wedding of the child of two of their oldest friends. They didn’t know that one of the bridesmaids would be Kristen Mulvihill, David’s wife, to whom he’d been married for only a few short months when he was seized. So Kristen and David were at the wedding. David was gaunt and pale, Mom said, as one would expect—but full of energy and remarkably well, all things considered. “We just sat there and held hands,” she told me. “I still can’t believe he’s okay.”

  I thought back to my conversations with Mom about the Didion—and about magical thinking. There was that morning in Florida when I was convinced that if we saw the manatees, Mom would have a good day. And I also realized that there was a different type of magical thinking—that certain things had to happen if Mom was to have the exit from life that she wanted. One of them was that Obama had to win the election. Another was that David Rohde had to come back safe. In addition to her personal affection for him, I think she regarded him as a talisman of sorts for the fate of the earth. If the David Rohdes were destined to perish, then what hope was there for the world? Whenever anyone doing humanitarian or refugee work or the hard task of journalism in troubled areas was killed or injured, Mom felt it pushed the balance toward chaos. But if a David Rohde could come back from near death, then maybe there was a future for the region and for us all. And if there was, then Mom could leave us all a more peaceful world than the one in which she’d lived. It would be easier for her to let go of life if she believed that everything would be okay. For Mom and David to meet again at a wedding was not just a miracle; it was a sign.

  AT THE NEXT doctor visit, the news was worse, as we now expected. The disease was progressing. Mom’s fevers and lack of energy were now clearly a result of the cancer—as there was no chemo, and she’d finally gotten rid of the C. diff. and other infections. To help with her flagging energy, they tried to give her a transfusion but had to stop because she developed a high fever. There wasn’t much to say. The main thing was to concentrate on the next few weeks, when she’d be in the country, in Pawling, New York, with Nina and Sally and their kids. Doug and Nancy and Nico and Adrian and Lucy would also be spending time there. Dad would divide his time between the country and the city; David and I would come to visit. The house, which belonged to one of my father’s two sisters, was an old clapboard, with grand trees, fields, and a pool. My aunt had told Mom she could be there as much as she wanted and have all the grandchildren come stay with her there. My father’s other sister had also been thoughtful at every turn—visiting, dropping off food, and performing dozens of other kindnesses.

  It was time to choose another book—and neither Mom nor I had yet read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Everyone had been raving to us about how addictive this book was: a mystery set in Sweden that teamed a journalist who was recovering from a libel verdict with a young Goth woman computer hacker. Larsson himself was a crusading anti-extremist Swedish journalist who had died of a heart attack in 2004 at age fifty, leaving behind three (or possibly four) unpublished novels, of which this was the first. Apparently he’d written them largely as a way to relax after work.

  When Mom finally tucked into the Larsson, she was hooked. Lisbeth Salander reminded her, she said, of some of her quirkiest and most interesting students—the high school girls she had taught and admitted to college who’d had lonely and painful childhoods but who’d nevertheless managed to make lives for themselves using their brains and resolve. Lisbeth shared with many of the refugee women Mom knew a special kind of courage and determination, along with a distrust of authorities bred by experience of corruption, capriciousness, and cruelty. It’s a book with a strong feminist current—and one that inspires revulsion at the sickening way women around the world are battered and tortured and abused. Mom said it also made her think of all the extraordinary women she’d met in refugee camps who spoke to aid workers and one another about the rapes and other acts of sexual violence committed against them, regardless of the stigma or the risks that came from making their voices heard.

  Our next book club meeting (preceding Mom’s monthly doctor visit, for which she’d come back into the city) was all about this book. The bizarrely prompt Dr. O’Reilly was running late—so even though Mom had stopped chemo, there was plenty of time to read and chat. To help her conserve her strength, we often now spent as much time reading together as discussing the books.

  “You know, Will—I think Stieg Larsson has probably done as much for the things I care most about with this book as any other writer I can think of. It would be very hard to read this and not understand what the Women’s Commission has been working for all these years. It’s a book I never would have read if so many friends hadn’t told me that I must. But now I can’t imagine not having read it.”

  (I had an odd thought about what would have happened if Lisbeth had been one of my mother’s students. I was fairly certain Mom would have put her computer skills to work helping reunite “unaccompanied minors” with their families, or redoing the content management system for the library in Kabul.)

  We both noted that reading plays a big role in the novel. Bloomkvist needs to comb through thousands of pages of documents to try to solve the mystery and still, when he wants to relax, reaches for a book. Over the course of the novel, he reads Sue Grafton, Val McDermid, and Sara Paretsky, among other mystery writers. While Lisbeth Salander finds what she needs on the computer, Bloomkvist looks to books and genealogies and photographs (and to old-fashioned interviews) for his discoveries. The two characters complement each other, as do their approaches to knowledge.

  I thought of the contrast between the physical and digital worlds as we sat together that day. Mom was finishing up the Larsson, holding the book in her lap. I was reading it on an electronic reader. She was turning the pages; I was clicking through them. I showed her the device—she, as always, had no interest.

  “I can’t see giving up real books,” she said. “And I love that I can give away my books after I’ve read them. Think of the first edition of The Magic Mountain I’m giving Nico. It was printed along with the first copy that went to Mann himself. It’s got a history.”

  “But electronic books are good for trips,” I said.

  �
��Yes, I can see that. And maybe for books you don’t want to keep.”

  And then something occurred to me. “You know: the thing about our book club is that we’ve really been in it all our lives.”

  Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. “I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. 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.

  I was still waiting to have the big talk, the one where I would tell Mom how much I loved her, and how proud I was of all she had accomplished, and how she had always been there for me—what a great mother she was. And she would tell me, then, how proud she was of me—but she would undoubtedly be carrying some guilt about something or other, and she would tell me that, and I would absolve her completely by genuinely not even knowing what she was talking about.

  There had been many days when we’d almost had the big talk but didn’t.

  On this particular afternoon, I accompanied her home after the doctor’s appointment, and we sat for a moment in the living room. Suddenly I heard myself say something that had just popped into my head. “I think I might want to write something—about the books we’ve read, and the conversations we’ve had—about our book club.”

  “Oh, sweetie, you don’t want to spend your time doing that. You have so many other things to do and to write.”

  “I have an idea. And I want to do it.” And then my voice broke. “Because I’m proud of you.”

  I think I initially meant to say “because I love you,” but then I heard myself saying “proud” and thought, I know that Mom knows I love her, but I don’t know if she knows I’m proud of her. So maybe I’d said it that way for a reason.

  Mom looked at the floor. I was due to leave soon, so I hurriedly kissed her on the cheek—gently, for fear of bruising her skin—and before I knew it, I was outside the door of the apartment. For the longest time, I stood there, unwilling or unable to push the elevator button and go home. I stared at her door and for the first time let myself realize fully that soon would come a day when she wouldn’t be behind it, when she’d be gone, when I’d be unable to talk to her about books, about anything. I felt a sharp pain and for a moment thought I was having a heart attack, but it was just panic. And finally, grief. I rang for the elevator and took the subway home.

  The next day I got an email from Mom. She’d put together a list of all the books we’d read, with notes—for my book. Mom kept sending me additions to the list and emails with thoughts she’d had. That op-ed she’d wanted to write, about Mariatu Kamara, the young woman from Sierra Leone—that should be in my book. Also something about the need for health care reform. 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.

  Brooklyn

  An eight-hour day at the hospital for a transfusion preceded a trip back out to the country house my aunt had loaned us. The transfusion had to be interrupted twice as Mom’s fever spiked. A friend of hers sat through the whole thing with her. When I asked Mom that night how she felt, she said, “A little guilty to be taking that much blood—but for fifty years I’ve donated blood to the Red Cross every time there was a blood drive, so I guess it’s okay if I take a little bit of it back.”

  The first days after she returned to the country went smoothly, though it was taking a titanic effort for her to make it through each day. Still, just sitting in the July sun, watching her grandchildren and reading when she had the energy, was enough. It had been twenty months, almost two years, since she’d been diagnosed—and she was well aware that she had survived far longer than anyone had expected. Then one day she woke up with a fever that got worse and worse. My sister and Sally and the boys were in the pool. Mom didn’t tell Nina and Sally there was a problem; she just called a car service to bring her back to the city. All they had available was a limo, and Mom didn’t want to bother anyone, so she said she’d take it. By the time the limo got there, a half hour later, she was able to convince my sister to let her go to New York by herself. Everyone waved to “Gram” as she went off in the limo.

  We had reached a point when it was hard to tell if any visit to the hospital would be the one from which Mom would never return. She was so frail—well under a hundred pounds. Later, my sister said she wasn’t sure it would be the worst thing if the boys’ last memory of their grandmother was of her getting into a limousine. My father and I met Mom at the hospital. They soon had her on a gurney. The port, implanted in her chest for her chemo treatments, was now protruding from her skin, a foreign object that no longer served any purpose, like a gas pipe that jutted into an apartment now heated by steam and electricity.

  Mom’s stent, the device that kept the path open between her bile duct and her liver, had become blocked and infected—she would spend three days in the hospital having it replaced. My sister was desperate to come back into the city with her kids—but no, that was out of the question. They were to enjoy the country and the pool. Mom would be back, and Dad would stay by her side in the meantime.

  When I went to see Mom the second day in the hospital, I asked her if she had enough to read—she did. While she dozed, I picked up Daily Strength for Daily Needs from beside her bed. That day’s entry read, “This is of great importance, to watch carefully,—now I am so weak—not to over fatigue myself, because then I cannot contribute to the pleasure of others; and a placid face and a gentle tone will make my family more happy than anything else I can do for them. Our own will gets sadly into the performance of our duties sometimes” (Elizabeth T. King).

  Four days later, Mom returned to the country house. There was no way she was going to miss spending time with her grandchildren. She was back just in time for a birthday party she’d organized—Milo’s sixth and Nico’s seventeenth and my forty-sixth. As all our birthdays were in July, Mom wanted one big party for us all together, as well as separate parties for each of us.

  Mom and Dad had bought lots of presents for everyone that day, including two for me. The first box I opened had a cream-colored sweater in it. It was nice, but it just didn’t seem like the kind of thing I would wear. I thanked her but stuck it aside. She’d also bought me a wonderful assortment of books. She hadn’t read any of them, but she did have her own copy of one, Brooklyn by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, which had just been published. We decided that it would be the next book for our club.

  We’d both already read several novels by Tóibín: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship. Tóibín’s portrayal of the relationship between gay men and their mothers, a theme that features in several of his works, was a topic Mom and I never discussed—perhaps because it seemed a little too close. I had come out to my parents when I was twenty and was taking a term off from college during my junior year to work in television in Los Angeles. I’d told everyone at college I was gay the day I arrived—yet I waited more than two years to tell Mom and Dad because I was worried that it would change our close relationship. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t wait any longer. While I was in Los Angeles, I’d submitted a very gay short story I’d written to a national gay literary magazine, which had accepted it—so I felt it only fair to warn them before it appeared on newsstands. I did so with a letter.

  Because I’d written them a letter, Mom replied by mail. Her letter admitted that her first reaction had been to be upset—and then she’d been upset at herself for being upset. She wrote that being married and having children had been her greatest joy, and she’d always wanted the same for all of us. Also, she wrote, she knew that, with the prejudice of society, being gay meant I would have a harder life, and no one wanted a harder life for a child. She added that if I wanted to be a writer, she hoped
I’d be a writer, not a gay writer.

  Dad was fine with it all, she wrote—his only worry was that I was going to want to talk about it all the time. The letter ended with her telling me that they loved me and we could all talk more about it later. We never did—but after a short period of some awkwardness, from then on I was able to count on their love and support. They took to David as soon as they were introduced. My sister came out to them a few years after she’d graduated from college. I don’t think Mom saw that coming either.

  Then as now, I looked to books to help me make sense of my life. Most important to me had been Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, a memoir in which he wrote about his life from 1929, when he moved as a young man to Berlin (mostly, as he wrote, to meet boys), to 1939, when he moved to America. During that time, he’d palled around with his school friend the poet W. H. Auden; amply sampled Berlin’s louche nightlife; fallen in love with a German man, and wandered all over Europe trying to avoid the Gestapo, which was pursuing them; and written The Berlin Stories, his classic work, which was later made into the play I Am a Camera, the Broadway musical Cabaret, and the film of the same name.

  I don’t know whether Tóibín prefers to be called a gay writer or just a writer. Though you could argue Brooklyn is written from a gay sensibility, there’s nothing gay in the plot.

  COME AUGUST 2009, my sister and Sally and their kids had returned to Geneva; Mom and I and the rest of the family were back in New York, sweating our way through the month. Our book club met again as we waited for our appointment with Dr. O’Reilly. Mom and I had arrived almost an hour early for no reason we could figure out.

  We both sat reading Brooklyn, side by side in chairs at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering waiting room. The novel tells the story of a young woman named Eilis who, after bravely establishing a new life for herself in 1950s Brooklyn, finds a part of her that wants to stay in Ireland after her return there.