We watched Lucy play for a while and also chatted with her seven-year-old brother, Adrian, who was taking a brief break from his duties as the party’s entertainment director.
“The only thing that makes me really sad,” said Mom, once Adrian had returned to the scrum, “is that I won’t see the little ones grow up. I really wanted to take them all to Broadway musicals and on special trips and to London.”
Mom had recently seen on television the film Auntie Mame, starring her former boss Rosalind Russell and her lifelong friend Pippa Scott, who played the ingénue at the end. I think it had rekindled in her the fantasy of being Auntie Mame, the woman who took her nephew on a glorious trip around the world and taught him that “life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
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. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories. I would always have the summer in Godalming when I was six and learned to tie my shoe; and the year in England when Nina drank so much Ribena blackberry currant syrup that we dubbed her Nina Ribena; and the performance of Giselle in London I’d seen with Mom, my first ballet ever, when Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland danced so brilliantly they got seventeen standing ovations, and Mom and I stood side by side with tears rolling down our faces because it was so thrilling; and all the plays we’d been to together—Janet Sussman in Hedda Gabler and Paul Scofield in Volpone. I would even have the times that seemed awful then but looked hilarious now: when we arrived in Wales with no hotel reservation and it was impossible to get a room and we’d driven for hours with me vomiting prodigiously all over my siblings in the backseat; the car ride through the Ring of Kerry with my sister spewing her guts over my brother and me.
But we were all going to have to say goodbye to Mom taking her youngest grandchildren to a Broadway show or to the Tate Modern or to Harrods to marvel at the Food Hall and visit the pet store puppies. We were going to have to say goodbye to the little ones remembering their grandmother beyond a fleeting image or an imagined memory prompted by a photograph. We would need to say goodbye to Mom at their graduations and to her buying them clothes and to them bringing home boyfriends and girlfriends to meet her.
We would also have to say goodbye to the joy of watching this next generation soak up the massive quantities of love their grandmother would have given them, and seeing them learn that there was someone in the world who loved them as much as their parents did: a grandmother who was delighted by all their quirks and who thought they were the most amazing creatures on earth. It was an idealized view of the future—but it was the one I carried in my head, and I don’t think it was far off from the one my brother and sister and father and mother had.
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.
Yet I had a thought then that made me smile. I would remember the books that Mom loved, and when the children were old enough, I could give those books to them and tell them that these were books their grandmother loved. The littlest ones would never see the British Isles through her eyes, but they could see it through the eyes of the writers she admired; they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.
The Lizard Cage
The roller coaster continued, good days flowing into bad days, bad into good. At each appointment, we learned when the next would be. And one book made way for another.
Every time I talked to Mom, she asked me if I’d yet read Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, the novel she loved about Burma, which had been published the previous year.
On a cold and damp day at the very end of January 2008, I was finally able to say that yes, I had.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” I said.
The book starts with a little boy, an orphan, and tells the story of his interaction with a political prisoner, a songwriter named Teza. The novel has harrowing scenes in prison. Teza, a Buddhist, must capture and eat raw lizards, breaking his faith by killing and consuming something that lived in order to survive himself; this is just part of his torment, though a potent symbol of it. It’s a tremendously powerful book that also speaks to our need to connect with each other, to tell stories and to pass them on, especially through writing.
Early on you come to a passage where the little boy talks about his friends in the prison. He names them and then says, “And books … My friends were books.” Even though he couldn’t read them, because he didn’t yet know how, their very existence gave him comfort.
Soon you learn that Teza is hoarding cigarettes because they are wrapped in newspaper and thus have scraps of words, odd little accidental modernist poems that are a lifeline to civilization. Soon, too, a single pen enters Teza’s life and then seemingly disappears. The search for this pen drives the plot, bringing both disaster and salvation of sorts—for Teza, the orphan, and a prison guard who befriends them. As for life outside the prison, where all dissent is forbidden, Connelly writes, “As long as there is paper, people will write, secretly, in small rooms, in the hidden chambers of their minds, just as people whisper the words they’re forbidden to speak aloud.”
In an era of computers, there’s something deeply poignant about a political prisoner with his scraps of paper, about a prison convulsed in the hunt for a pen, and about Connelly’s recognition of the importance of the written and printed word. It’s easy to forget in our wired world that there are not just places like prisons where electronic text is forbidden, but whole countries, like Burma, where an unregistered modem will land you in jail or worse. Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has.
“What did you think of the amazing prayer Teza says to himself after that horrible beating?” Mom asked me as we sat together, chemo flowing into her arm. “I xeroxed it and put it in my copy of Daily Strength. It’s in my bag.”
I gave Mom her bag, which was propped up on the chair beside me. Mom carefully, with her free hand, fished out the book and handed it to me. Neatly folded inside was a copy of the page from The Lizard Cage, with the incantation that made such an impression on Mom. It’s a Buddhist meditation that Teza uses to calm his mind, to put aside not just the physical pain but the sadness and rage he’s feeling:
He starts to whisper a prayer. “Whatever beings there are, may they be free from suffering. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from enmity. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from hurtfulness. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from ill health. 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.
“It’s very inspiring,” I said.
“Yes, but The Lizard Cage shouldn’t just inspire you. It should also make you furious.”
Often we feel the need to say that a book isn’t just about a particular time or place but is about the human spirit. People say this of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel, or A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. But it’s one thing to feel that a book can speak beyond its particular time and place to something universal, and another to ignore the circumstances and time in or about which it was written. Mom felt that we were all too quick to do that—for those books and for The Lizard Cage. Sure, it�
�s about human courage. But it’s also about human rights in Burma. And at the time of our reading, and the time of this writing, the situation in Burma was and is indeed something that should inspire fury and action. Connelly, a Canadian poet and nonfiction writer, had been to Burma many times until she was denied a visa by the military regime; she’d also lived for nearly two years on the Thai-Burmese border. She not only knew the situation intimately; she had committed to doing something about it.
When I went to visit Mom and Dad’s home a week after my conversation with her about The Lizard Cage, I noticed an envelope waiting to be mailed. It was for the U.S. Campaign for Burma. This wasn’t Mom’s first engagement with this country. She’d traveled there in 1993 on a mission for the Women’s Commission. And she’d even met with Aung San Suu Kyi, the lawfully elected leader of Burma, in one of the brief periods where Suu Kyi was free from house arrest. They’d talked about women’s rights, health issues, and refugees. Always refugees.
IF The Lizard Cage reminded Mom to send a check to the campaign for Burma, it also inspired her to redouble her efforts for Afghanistan. It was, after all, a book about the importance of books and reading and writing. The Afghan library had added a sixth board member in January, a prominent Afghan diplomat. Things were moving. What was needed now was money—and lots of it. Not thousands but millions. Otherwise, ground would never be broken in Kabul; the books would remain in storage; no roving libraries would reach the children of Afghanistan’s villages.
Mom was always spreading the word about the library to anyone who would listen.
This was another lesson I learned from Mom over the course of our book club: Never make assumptions about people. You never know who can and will want to help you until you ask. So you should never assume someone can’t or won’t because of their age, or job, or other interests, or financial situation.
“I was once giving a talk to some high school students during the war in Bosnia,” she told me. “And the next day one of them called me. It turns out that she was the daughter of a big executive, and over the previous night’s dinner, she’d convinced her dad to get his company not just to donate a huge amount of supplies but also to pay to fly them to Bosnia. That’s why I tell everyone about the library. You never know who will help.”
Even the doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering who were treating Mom heard, in the middle of the treatments, about the Afghan library—and so did the nurses, cabdrivers, friends at dinner parties, and strangers in delis.
I teased her one day. “Mom, I sometimes think if your apartment was burning down and the firemen rushed in, you’d tell them about the Afghan library before you let them put the fire out.”
“I’m not that bad,” Mom replied. “But I might tell them after they put it out.”
Brat Farrar
Just before I left my job in book publishing, a remarkable opportunity had arisen for the company to publish a book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, a forty-seven-year-old computer scientist and professor who himself was dying of pancreatic cancer. It started with an article by the Wall Street Journal staff writer Jeffrey Zaslow about Pausch, who’d been asked by his university, Carnegie Mellon, to deliver what used to be called a “Last Lecture,” the idea being that you would speak about the things you would speak about if you were giving the last lecture you would ever give. The irony in the case of Randy Pausch was that he knew that it would, indeed, be that—and he used the speech to impart lessons he’d learned, not just for the people listening, but for an audience that was extremely important to him: his young children. I’d told my former colleagues about Mom’s illness, and they gave me a typescript copy to read as soon as the last word was written, which was right before I was to leave for Florida to spend two weeks with Mom. I’d brought the copy with me.
Mom was to be in Florida for the whole month of February. Dad had been there the first two weeks but was on his way back to New York to look after his business. My brother and sister and their families had also been there. So now I flew down to West Palm Beach the same day Dad returned to New York. Mom arranged for a driver to pick me up and bring me to Vero Beach—I would use the car she and Dad had rented there for getting around.
Mom loved almost everything about Vero—the weather, the beach, the house she rented from a friend, the rituals and rhythms, the small but excellent museum, the lectures at the library, and even the supermarket, with its luxuriously wide aisles. The town also has one of America’s great independent bookstores, the Vero Beach Book Center. Immediately after I’d thrown my suitcase into what would be my bedroom, I sat down with Mom as she went over the schedule.
“First off, I want to get some new books for us to read. I also really want to spend some time rereading authors I’ve loved—more Jane Austen—and also poetry—T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop.” New and old. Mom always kept these in balance, constantly introducing her childhood friends to people she’d just met, always adding a stopover in a new place on a journey to a more familiar city or town, reading the latest authors in counterpoint to her favorites.
As Mom was talking, I looked at her closely. Her hair was much thinner, wispy, flatter, the grayish-white color of chicken bones left in the sun. And she’d continued to lose weight, something you couldn’t help noticing even though she was always bundled up in several layers—to protect her from the sun outside and the fierce air-conditioning of Florida’s shops and homes and restaurants. Yet she did look well, especially in comparison to how tired and drawn she’d looked when I’d last seen her, a few weeks earlier, on a freezing day in New York.
Mom told me about a lunch that the Women’s Commission staff had given her right before she left for Vero Beach. She’d come in to tell everyone about the Afghan project, but the staff turned it into a celebration of Mom’s contributions, from the years when she ran the organization and since. They’d presented her with a scrapbook of photos of her various missions to refugee camps and of all her friends at the commission. Mom had been very moved.
Oh, and she had one more thing to show me. I was to wait right there. It was a surprise.
I sat at the kitchen table in her Vero condo, waiting. Mom had left the kitchen for her bedroom. Many minutes went by. And then more.
“Mom, are you okay? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, just wait there. I’ll be right out.”
Mom was not usually a fan of surprises, so I couldn’t imagine what this one was. And then finally she emerged, and I saw it. She was wearing a wig—a large, almost Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant, in several different shades of gray and also with strands of black. It was perched awkwardly on her head; she’d been trying to get it right, but it sat uneasily, more like a hat.
“Not bad, is it?” said Mom.
I was determined not to cry.
“Not bad at all,” I said.
“Maybe it needs a little more styling—it’s too big—but I think it will be the difference between me looking sick and looking okay. I feel so lucky that I still have some hair, but it gets thinner and thinner—so I have this now. Still, keeping my hair for six months after starting chemo was more than I’d hoped for. So I’m not complaining. Your sister thinks the color isn’t quite right, but I’m sure they can do something with that.”
“It is a little dark. But it looks great. You look great, Mom.”
“I’ll go put it away. Then we’ll do the errands and have fun being together.”
One of the problems about lying to my mother when I was growing up was that I almost always got caught. This was partly due to Mom’s formidable memory. “Where are you going?” she would ask me as I was sneaking out of the house, at age twelve, for a forbidden trip on the subway from suburban Cambridge to louche downtown Boston to visit Jack’s Joke Shop, where I could buy fake vomit, joy buzzers, and other such things. “To Jim’s house,” I might lie. “But I thought you mentioned a few months ago that Jim and his parents were going this weekend to visit Jim’s grandmother in Ash
eville.” Arrggh.
It would be months before Mom would try the wig again.
THAT AFTERNOON, ACCORDING to plan, we did indeed go to the Vero Beach Book Center. Whenever I went to a bookstore with Mom, we would first split up—doubling our recon ability. We’d wait maybe fifteen minutes before finding each other—then each of us would give the other a little guided tour of what we had discovered. Just as you might wander a bit by yourself when visiting a garden outside a historic home, but then feel the need to show your companions the treasures you’d found—Look at these lilacs, the hydrangea, the rose garden—so we would point out to each other what we’d stumbled upon.
“Did you know this author has a new book? What do you think?” Mom might ask.
“I didn’t love his last four or five,” I might answer.
“Well then, why did you keep reading him?”
“I edited them.”
Or: “Have you heard anything about this one?”
“Yes, I’m sure I read something—but I can’t remember what—it’s either supposed to be terrific or terrible.”
There are all kinds of serendipities in bookstores, starting with Alphabetical: while looking for one novel, you might remember that you’d always meant to read something by another author whose last name shared the same first two letters. Visual: the shiny jacket on this book might catch your eye. Accidental: superstitiously, I almost always feel the need to buy any book that I knock over. And Prompted: both Mom and I gave very serious consideration to any book placed in the “staff recommends” section, particularly if it sported a yellow stickie (aka Post-it note) or a handwritten shelf talker—a bookstore neologism I love, because it conjures such a vivid image of a shelf talking to you, or of a person who talks to shelves.
This trip I wound up with Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey (a Vero Beach Book Center Staff Favorite) and the second volume of W. Somerset Maugham’s Collected Short Stories, which I’d clumsily knocked off a shelf. Mom bought Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, an 1889 account of a comical boat trip that one of our friends insisted she read. (I’m pretty sure she did, but we never discussed it.)
The End of Your Life Book Club Page 12