“Mom, there’s one book I brought with me from New York,” I said as we headed out the door and toward the car. It was quite cool for Florida. I’m terrible at parking and so had avoided spaces near the store that a normal driver could have squeezed into in favor of one far away that a Mack truck driver could have sailed into drunk. “It’s actually a typescript of the book I told you about—The Last Lecture—the one by the Carnegie Mellon professor, the man who has pancreatic cancer.”
“How is he doing?” Mom asked.
“I think he’s hanging in there. I spoke to him on the phone once, a few weeks ago, right before I quit. He’s incredibly nice.”
“That’s what my friends at Lustgarten say. They love him.” Mom had recently been in touch with people at the Lustgarten Foundation, an organization devoted to funding research related to pancreatic cancer and raising awareness of symptoms and treatments, which was founded in memory of an executive at Cablevision who’d died at age fifty-two of the disease.
I wasn’t sure if Mom wanted to read a book that so baldly stated from the outset that the author knew he had only a few months left to live. As soon as we were back at Mom’s house, I decided that I would just leave it on the breakfast table—my own little “staff recommends.” That way she could come across it and decide whether she wanted to read it or not.
“Why don’t you have a walk on the beach?” Mom suggested. “I’m going to put my feet up for a bit.”
So I left Mom sitting on the couch, and out I went, Tey in hand.
I stayed out far longer than I’d meant to, sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean. Usually beach reading is better in theory than in practice. The sun is too bright and my sunglasses aren’t progressives, so I need to take them off to read; people walk by and stir up mini-sandstorms; I get too hot; I need a drink; I should really swim, as the water is great. Sometimes I just have the wrong book—something too serious to compete with the hysterical shrieks of children all around, or too silly to match a darkening mood.
But today was perfect for beach reading, and Brat Farrar grabbed me from the start. Written in 1949, it reminded me a great deal of Patricia Highsmith’s breakout book The Talented Mr. Ripley, published six years later: in both, there’s murder, lies, and an imposter. Tey’s clever twist is that the murderer is the only one who knows for sure that the imposter can’t possibly be who he says he is, and yet he can’t reveal this fact without incriminating himself. Beyond the plot is the sheer fun of life in a British country estate—the descriptions of which you never tire, if you never tire of that sort of description—the silver service, the horses, the drawing room drinks, the dressing for dinner.
Tey had died in 1952 of cancer at the age of fifty-five. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, and she was born in Inverness, Scotland, the daughter of a fruit dealer and a former teacher. She never gave interviews and wasn’t known to have close friends. Not only had I never read her, I’d never heard of her. But I found myself whipping through Brat Farrar. I was excited to give it to Mom.
Every now and then I would force myself to pause, put down the book, and think. What my mind kept fixing on was lies. Would it have served Mom better to tell her that the wig wasn’t great? Probably not. And yet I had a hard time remembering a single time Mom had lied to me. There was my stuffed turtle, of course, which she’d given to the orphans, though no Brat Farrar–like mock turtle had appeared in its place. And there were the lies when she said something was really no problem and of course it was. Was she lying now? She said she wasn’t in pain, yet we all caught her, in private moments, grimacing, or taking a sharp breath, or biting her lower lip.
Eventually it was time to leave the beach and walk back to the condo. Mom was still on the couch, back to me, when I came through the door. There was a stack of papers on the coffee table in front of her. It was The Last Lecture.
“What did you think?” I asked her.
“It made me feel so very, very lucky.”
“Really?” I felt then the need to state the obvious. “But you have exactly the same thing he has.”
“Of course. But he’s got three small children and will never get to see them grow up, and he’ll never know what it’s like to have grandchildren.”
Continental Drift
Plenty of people are willing to talk about death but very few about dying. Mom, on the other hand, made it clear to all who asked her that she knew she had an incurable disease that was eventually going to kill her. Any mention of something a year off—the wedding of the child of a friend, for example—brought the subject to the fore. Mom would usually say that she would love to attend, if she was still here and well enough. Sometimes she’d candidly say that she didn’t think it likely that she would be around.
Some people continued to ignore the way Mom talked about her cancer. “I’m sure you’ll get better,” they would say. Or “You’ll beat this.” Or they would volunteer the story of a friend or relative or entertainer who had a miraculous recovery from something everyone had deemed hopeless and fatal.
When we talked about it, Mom occasionially expressed frustration. People weren’t listening. She wasn’t going to get better. But sometimes I think she was genuinely comforted and did consider that there could be a miracle. There were days when she wanted to talk about her death, and days when she didn’t. It could even switch minute to minute. It felt like being in a car with a driver who abruptly changes lanes without ever signaling. One minute we’d be talking about aspects of her funeral, then suddenly she’d be onto the television film of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and then, barely pausing to take a breath, she’d be right back at the funeral—no flowers in the church; Doug was to be in charge of all aspects of the service (they’d had extensive discussions already about what prayers would be read and what hymns would be sung); it should definitely not go one minute over an hour.
Years before Mom was diagnosed, after she and Dad had discovered the hospice movement and the concept of palliative care, they’d talked to us about their Do Not Resuscitate orders and their Living Wills and other legal paperwork they’d executed. They were emphatic that they wanted to die at home; no heroic measures were to be taken to save their lives once their bodies started to fail, if it was clear they did indeed have a terminal condition. Perhaps this helped explain why Mom was so comfortable discussing all aspects of her death and what needed to be done.
A FRIEND OF a friend of mine from London had once visited New York and gotten sick. She spent her whole time in New York City cooped up in our friend’s apartment. At the end of a week watching U.S. television day and night, she announced she had finally gotten Yanks all figured out. “The thing about Americans,” she said, “is that you’re very concerned about everything all the time.”
Mom wasn’t. Part of what made her effective was that she worried about things sequentially. She did what she could for everything that concerned her but devoted the bulk of her attention to one major project at a time. In her last years, the one thing was to be the Afghan library. So every day was filled with phone calls and meetings to advance this cause. Brochures had to be designed and distributed and people invited to benefits. There were proposals to look over, and architectural concepts for the library building to assess, and questions about governance and the logistics of the traveling libraries to consider. Safety was always a priority. Mom told me that she was especially concerned about her friend and fellow board member David Rhode, the New York Times writer, as he was reporting for his book from Kandahar and was not embedded with the U.S. troops. “Mom,” I said one day, when she seemed particularly tired. “Everyone said it’s fine if you want to relax and stay at home and listen to music.”
“I know that,” Mom said. “And I really am going to slow down—just as soon as everything is set on the library. I’m just going to do a little more work trying to raise money for it, and then I’ll hand it all over.”
ON MARCH 16, 2008, now back in New York,
we went in for the results of Mom’s second scan since she’d been diagnosed. She had started to react badly to Xeloda, one of her chemo drugs, and had been taken off it. Therefore the results of this scan, we were warned, might not be as good as the first.
Mom was feeling better, had gained some weight, and had more energy. So she said she didn’t think it could be terrible news but was ready to hear anything. I thought back to a dramatic story I’d been told at college by a man who’d spent more than twenty years in a Chinese prison. I always pondered it (or, rather, my probably not-entirely-accurate recollection of it) when I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute.
This man had joined the CIA right out of Yale, during the Korean War, and then been shot down over China during his first mission and captured. He’d fully come to terms with the fact that he might be sentenced to several years in jail there and was praying that his sentence would be less than five years. That he could handle. But he would be devastated should it be more. After two years in solitary confinement, he was called into a courtroom with a whole bunch of prisoners. They would all have their sentences read, one after another. He described hearing the first sentence: death. Then the second: death. Then the third: death. And all of a sudden, he found himself praying for life in prison. He could handle that. Life in prison was indeed the sentence he got—and he was delighted.
I told Mom that story and she smiled.
“No new tumors would be great news,” she said.
SOON DAD ARRIVED, and then we were called into the examination room to wait for Dr. O’Reilly, who joined us minutes later. She was in her usual white medical coat—but this time I noticed that she was wearing a delicate gold necklace. Her eyes sparkled more than usual—they’re robin’s-egg blue and jewel-like against her pale skin. Her hair, as always, was in the mop-top style of teen boy idols. I may have imagined it, but her step seemed lighter, as though she were bursting to tell us something, and she seemed to rush through her initial questions. (How was Florida? How did the treatments there go? The blisters and mouth sores—much better? The constipation and diarrhea?) Now it was time for the scan results.
“Well, I have to tell you,” began Dr. O’Reilly, “that the news is very good. There are no new tumors and the ones that are there have shrunk. It’s significant improvement. And you’ve put some weight back on. And your energy?”
“Much better,” said Mom.
“It’s hard to believe you’re the same person,” Dr. O’Reilly said.
“How much smaller are Mom’s tumors?” I asked.
“Well, about thirty percent of the liver was involved when you first came in,” she said, as always addressing Mom, no matter who had asked the question. “Now it’s much closer to fifteen percent.”
I thought of the CIA agent, thrilled with the sentence of life in prison. Only when you’ve had 30 percent of your liver filled with cancerous tumors does it qualify as great news that you are at 15 percent. Though if the number kept falling, of course, it would be great news no matter how one viewed it. When I looked over at Mom, I saw that color had returned to her face. Dad was smiling broadly, whereas minutes ago he’d been smiling, but nervously. As soon as we were back out in the waiting room, I called my sister and brother and uncle to give them the report.
There would be more time.
DAD LEFT, AND Mom and I went to sit together during her chemo. “I guess everyone’s prayers really made a difference,” she said, settling down into the chair in one of the curtained rooms. “I’ll have to let Fred know.” Fred was her minister at Madison Avenue Presbyterian.
“Do you have the Wodehouse?” she then asked me, without missing a beat.
“Yes, right here in my bag. It’s just so much fun.”
P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels were turning out to be a joy: tales of a butler of uncanny abilities and his sweet but hapless employer. My oldest godson, a classicist turned lawyer, is a huge fan of the Jeeves novels; his parents, great friends of Mom and Dad and mine, had insisted we both give Wodehouse another try.
“I’d never had much patience for Wodehouse,” Mom said, “until now. But I think the stories are wonderful. And more sweet than silly. Certainly not as silly as Brat Farrar. I still don’t understand why you liked that so much.” The Josephine Tey book I’d read in Florida was one of the few books about which Mom and I disagreed. She’d argued that the surprise ending would have been entirely predictable even if she hadn’t already read the end and that she didn’t find the characters very interesting. I got a bit huffy about it.
“I just liked it,” I said, realizing that I wasn’t making a very good argument. “And don’t you sometimes feel like reading something silly, just to distract you, to take your mind off things?”
“I think it’s much harder for me now to read very silly things when there are so many wonderful things to read and reread. And if the book is too silly, I find that it’s often because the writer doesn’t really have anything to say—or there are no values. Or because the whole book is just a lead-up to a trick at the end. If you read the ends first, you have much less patience for wasting time with that kind of book. Even a well-written book can be silly and a waste of time. But most of the Wodehouse is different. I don’t find the stories silly. I like his people—Bertie and Jeeves and Psmith. They’re slightly ridiculous but also endearing. And I like the odd things that Wodehouse characters collect, socks and silver and monocles. It reminds me of so many of our friends who collect strange things, like jewelry made from mahjong tiles or postcards of all-female marching bands. He’s clearly having fun with that world of dinners and engagements and dowager aunts. That’s my point, Will. The books are fun, not silly. There’s a difference.”
“But what about a book like Alice in Wonderland? Is that silly?”
“Lewis Carroll is definitely not silly. It has silliness, but it’s a wonderful, fascinating, complicated book. I’m talking about those novels where the characters aren’t really interesting and you don’t care about them or anything they care about. It’s those I won’t read anymore. There’s too much else to read—books about people and things that matter, books about life and death.”
“But”—I looked at the floor, because I was about to bring up a subject I hadn’t intended to discuss here and now—“isn’t it hard to read books about death?” I paused. “Especially books where a character has cancer?”
Mom shook her head. “It’s not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Melanie’s death in Gone With the Wind. But I’m still so glad I got to know her. As for books about cancer—” She paused to consider the question. “Well, I don’t think it’s any sadder to die from cancer than from a heart attack or another disease or an accident or anything else. It’s all just part of life, real life. If we ruled out books with death in them, we wouldn’t have much to read.”
“So you don’t mind if we read depressing books?” I asked.
“No—not at all. It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty.”
“Why is it important?”
“Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley treats Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It starts with asides and looks and put-downs. There are so many great examples from Shakespeare—when Goneril torments King Lear or the way Iago speaks to Othello. And what I love about Dic
kens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”
I was reminded that Mom had spent years teaching high school English after moving back to New York. I asked Mom if there’d been books that were too depressing for her to teach or read.
“I don’t think so.”
“Even books where the characters are not just dying but in pain?”
“Even those.”
“And even ones where really bad things happen to people?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well then, here’s our next book.” I’d heard great things for years about Continental Drift by Russell Banks, and the book had been on my shelf for ages. I’d also heard that it was savagely depressing. I gave Mom my copy and then bought another.
OVER THE COURSE of Continental Drift, you watch a life fall apart. There’s something very Appointment in Samarra about it, as one bad decision starts to unravel everything. As with the O’Hara, it’s not just the bad decision; weakness and stubbornness also contribute. Fate sometimes lives in character—there are people who can’t change who they are any more than they can change what happens to them. Banks chronicles the deterioration of a flawed but sympathetic man, a hockey player, who moves from New Hampshire to Florida with his wife and children to pursue the classic American Dream—to get a better life for himself and his family. The book tells in parallel the story of a young Haitian woman and her infant and nephew, and their journey as refugees—also to Florida—as she tries to make a new life for the three of them. Things go horrendously badly—both on an illegal boat and long before, on their journey to it. There’s horrific sexual violence, of the kind used as a weapon of war against so many around the world. There’s other violence too. And rage and cruelty. It’s a book filled with missed opportunities, chronicling lives where people could have caught breaks but didn’t; where if anything could go wrong, it did.
The End of Your Life Book Club Page 13