The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  Banks was born in 1940 in Massachusetts, making him six years younger than Mom. He got to college on a scholarship but dropped out and started to travel toward Cuba, stopping in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he married at age nineteen, having a child and then getting divorced in 1962, the year I was born. Continental Drift, published in 1985, was his second book and a major critical success.

  We both read Continental Drift right away—but had no opportunity to discuss it. It would be a few weeks before Mom’s next chemo appointment. Mom’s birthday was coming up soon after, so our immediate task was to figure out how to celebrate it, and this, along with the usual updates about the grandchildren, occupied all our calls. The scan had changed our lives yet again. Mom was still dying but not, thankfully, as quickly as we feared. She would be dying for some time to come. Or to put it more cheerfully, living. No matter what, we would have celebrated her birthday; what had changed was how we would celebrate it.

  For someone who had little appetite for food, Mom had expressed a very odd wish for this birthday. A year or so before, she’d discovered a restaurant called Daisy May’s that delivered delicious barbecue. The actual restaurant is in what was then a desolate area of Manhattan, a stretch of Eleventh Avenue that is home to auto dealers and body shops, the occasional bar, parking lots, and industrial buildings. Not dangerous, just derelict. This was where Mom wanted to celebrate her seventy-fourth birthday. She didn’t want anything fancy or fussy or expensive, and she wanted the meal at the actual restaurant itself—so no one of us would have to do any cleanup.

  The party would be small—the immediate family, my dad’s two sisters, and a few friends. I’d arranged for a thirty-pound barbecued pig and lots of sides: macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, creamy corn with cheddar cheese, bourbon peaches, coleslaw, baked beans, collard greens, Texas toast. With barbecue, you need to go big or go home, as they say. The pig was ordered two days in advance. I kept Mom up-to-date during our morning calls about various details and asked her advice: Who should sit where? Was it necessary to have mashed potatoes in addition to the sweet potatoes? What time should the dinner start?

  As the day of the party grew closer, however, I could tell Mom was feeling worse and worse. After the euphoria from the scan results wore off, we went from “much better” to “not great.” She was to have a treatment four days before her birthday, with a friend accompanying her. She was hoping that the steroids they gave her with the chemo would carry her through. They usually gave her a lift. But this time they didn’t.

  The morning of the party, I called Mom to consult on the final details. If it sounds like I was being a little crazy with all the questions, well, I was. But I just wanted it to be flawless. I wanted the pig and sides to be delicious, the seating to be perfect, the timing to be right. I wanted the weather to be good, and people to be able to find cabs afterward. (There is no subway anywhere nearby.) I wanted it not to be too loud or too quiet. What I really wanted was for Mom not to be dying so that I wouldn’t have to feel that I only had one or two more shots at throwing a birthday party for her. But that wasn’t an option. I felt I needed to get every little thing perfectly right.

  But that’s quite a tightrope act. Who can stand the pressure? Still, I couldn’t help myself. I was reminded of visiting Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth, and seeing some families ready to tear one another’s eyes out—the kids sobbing inconsolably from greed and exhaustion and the stress of it all, the parents looking daggers at each other, the older children rolling their eyes or clearly stoned out of their minds. Every now and then you even heard someone say a variation of the following: “We traveled all this way and paid all this money, and you are going to have fun, do you hear me? You will have fun right now, damnit, or I’ll pack up the whole family and drive us home this instant, and we’ll never come back again.”

  So I asked my nutty questions, tried to think out every detail, and prayed that it wouldn’t rain and that the god of taxicabs would smile upon us.

  It didn’t rain. And all the details were falling into place. Except for one. On the day of Mom’s birthday, she was feeling worse than “not great.” She was feeling “rocky.”

  I GOT TO Daisy May’s early. Mom was already there. She looked small and frail and tired. In the minutes before everyone arrived, I updated her on the evening and the drill. She then went to meet Junior and his dad, both of whom are key parts of Team Daisy May. As I was fussing with the coolers of wine and beer, I watched her do as she always did. She introduced herself to them and asked questions about where they were from, and before my eyes I saw her get a little better, a little stronger. So when everyone arrived, she seemed back—if not to herself, then to a pretty good imitation of herself.

  MOM PERCHED ON the edge of her chair, too unwell to eat, with an enormous pig laid out in front of her, flayed. My job was to wear the thick rubber gloves the restaurant provided so I could stand the heat of the pig meat as I ripped out great chunks of it with my fingers—the bacon, the ham, the shoulder—and deposited flesh on everyone’s plates. Very primal.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conversation quickly turned to Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel by William Golding, about kids fending for themselves on an island. A pig features heavily in the novel as a target of the boys’ ferocity, as does a character unkindly called Piggy. As the meal got under way, though, the conversation turned to other books.

  Mom and I hadn’t yet announced to anyone in the family that we had a book club. It was just something special between us that we barely acknowledged, even to each other. After all, what kind of club has only two members? Still, no one thought it odd that Mom and I both started talking, more or less simultaneously, about Continental Drift; we couldn’t wait any longer to discuss it. Almost everyone else had heard of the book, but my brother, who reads as much if not more than anyone in the family, was the only other person there who had read it.

  “What did you think of it?” I asked both Doug and Mom.

  “Brilliant,” said my brother.

  “Yes,” said Mom as I ripped out a juicy bit of bacon and dumped it, dripping with gorgeous fat, onto my sister-in-law Nancy’s plate right beside her. “Brilliant. But so depressing. I think it may be the most depressing thing I’ve ever read.”

  The most depressing thing Mom had ever read? I was shocked. Had I been insane to include Continental Drift in our makeshift book club? Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake.

  Meanwhile, all around me, the party went on—lots of laughter, lots more pig. One of the great things about Daisy May’s is that there can be only one pig a night, and you don’t have it in a private room—there are no private rooms. You have it at a big gingham-covered picnic table at the far end of a room with two other giant picnic tables, both of which are filled with an assortment of people eating food, cafeteria style, that they buy from the counter up front. It’s a popular place among cops and firemen, and the pig is an event that involves the whole restaurant. Everyone who is new to the place wants to stand over it and have a look and find out how you get one.

  So throughout the evening, a small parade of people came up to say “Sorry to interrupt” and ask about the pig. True to form, Mom talked to everyone who approached.

  I could see the others in our group checking on Mom periodically, and it was obvious that she was growing less and less animated. My brother, when he wasn’t deep in conversation, kept the sides moving. Doug has a remarkable ability to engage fully in conversations while also being attuned to the comfort of everyone around him.

  We hurried through the rest of the meal to make sure that it reached its conclusion before whatever adrenaline Mom had been able to muster evaporated or did whatever it is adrenaline does when it’s done.

  For dessert, we ate red velvet cupcakes. They put a candle in Mom’s. We sang “Happy Birthday” quite quietly—Mom had never liked it when we were loud in restaurants. But everyone at Daisy May’s joined in nonetheless. David took pictures. Then we packed up the
leftovers and divvied them up, insisting that others take them, or begging off with elaborate politeness, not because we didn’t want more pig meat in the days ahead but simply because there was so much of it.

  Almost before we knew it, Mom was in a cab on her way home with Dad. It was a clear night and there were plenty of taxis. David and I walked home down Eleventh Avenue.

  Though it had actually been a fun evening, I was suddenly overcome with anxiety and sadness. Yes, people had enjoyed themselves. Yes, the pig had worked, not just because it was delicious but also because it had given everyone a distraction—something to laugh about and discuss. Mom had been right about the mashed potatoes (not needed) and about the placement. Most important, she had felt well enough to be there.

  But what had I been thinking, giving her Continental Drift to read? Mom had said she liked serious books, even depressing ones, but was this one too depressing? Had I given her not more than she could take but, perhaps, more than she’d wanted to take? Should I have read it first, before suggesting it—or just known from the description on the back that it might be too dire, too depressing, for someone dying?

  Soon enough, David and I were home, but I couldn’t sleep. How could I have been so stupid as to suggest that book? David slumbered while I paced, quietly, around our apartment, racked with remorse. It doesn’t take a genius in psychology to know, and I did, that I was behaving like a crazy person. I hadn’t given Mom the wrong medicine or made her stand out in the cold or left her feverish to fend for herself by the side of the road. Okay, so I’d suggested a book that might have been a bit dark. This was not even a particularly big offense in the pantheon of book club crimes, where the worst sin one could commit was not to read the book in question—or, even worse, to lie about having read the book when, in fact, you’d simply seen the movie, a lie usually uncovered when you used the actor’s name by accident. (“I love the part when Daniel Day-Lewis …”)

  Many people who have my kind of insomnia have various behavioral strategies for dealing with it. One technique involves keeping a notepad by the bed. We write down our worries—to get them out of our perseverating brains and onto paper so we can sleep knowing that they will be there, in black and white, for us to worry about when we awake, and also knowing that we’ll likely find those same worries inconsequential or even ridiculous when the morning does come. I tried that. It didn’t work. I was still awake.

  It was too late for an Ambien. I had to be up the next morning for my eight A.M. chat with Mom. And so I did what I was to do so many times that year: I sat in the dark and berated myself. Then I watched some television—episodes I’d taped of The Real World, a reality show I loved about seven kids picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. Then I tried unsuccessfully to read. At about four A.M., I finally fell asleep for a few hours. When I awoke, I remembered being awake most of the night, but at first I had only the vaguest memories of what had kept me up—maybe it was too much pig, too much beer, too much stress? After serving as the human snooze alarm for David—the king, every morning, of “five more minutes, five more minutes”—I finally glanced at the “worry pad” I kept next to my bed. It said:

  YOU MUST CHOOSE MORE CHEERFUL BOOKS FOR THE BOOK CLUB.

  AT EIGHT FIFTEEN A.M., I called Mom. She’d had a wonderful time at her birthday, she said, and was very grateful to David and me and to Doug and Nancy, who’d shared the tab and co-hosted.

  “I’ve been sending lots of emails this morning,” she added.

  “What about?” I asked.

  “Mostly arrangements for the trip your father and I are taking to England and Geneva this spring. And I also wanted to send lots of emails to people about Continental Drift. I kept waking up and thinking of people who should read it.”

  The Painted Veil

  Prior to getting this sick, Mom hadn’t been big on seeing doctors. When her previous one had retired, she told the new doctor that she would come and see him only if she was dying. So it was indeed very strange that the first time she went to see him after her initial physical, when she was just back from Afghanistan, she had indeed been dying, even though she hadn’t known it.

  She’d been relatively healthy since the gallbladder operation a few years before, other than constantly picking up, as I’ve written, a cough or a rash or a stomach bug on her trips. And though she didn’t take part in walks for the cure, or ever, in my hearing, refer to herself as a breast cancer survivor, she did consider it one of the major experiences of her life, again framing it in terms not of bad luck that she’d had it but of good fortune that she’d survived it.

  Now she was seeing doctors all the time: Dr. O’Reilly, and her GP, and the doctor who’d put in the stent and would replace it when it got infected, and the doctors at the urgent-care facility where she would go when she got a sudden fever, and various specialists for various things.

  In early April 2008, she would have her only treatment of the month, so that would be our next book club meeting. She was now more than six months past her initial diagnosis, during which time she’d been undergoing chemotherapy without pause. She’d been feeling increasingly “not great,” and Dr. O’Reilly decided to give her body a few weeks to recover after this treatment.

  Given that we were at Sloan-Kettering, Mom and I often found ourselves talking about doctors and books. But during this meeting, we talked of doctors in books, something you wind up doing frequently when you talk about Somerset Maugham, whose collection of short stories I’d picked up at the Vero Beach Book Center. I’d read the volume and then given it to Mom.

  The Maugham stories had brought us back to his novels. Maugham wrote brilliantly about doctors, having trained and worked for six years as one. We didn’t reread Of Human Bondage, his first major success, but we did decide that it was time to visit The Painted Veil again, the story of a doctor and his unfaithful wife, Kitty, who go, for very different reasons, to rural China to battle a cholera epidemic. He wrote it in 1925 when he was fifty-one years old, inspired in part by a story he came across in his travels about a woman in Hong Kong who had been involved in a scandal for cheating on her husband; but also, he said, by a scene in Book V of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which a man who suspects his wife of adultery takes her to his castle, hoping the “noxious vapors” from the surrounding bogs and marshes will kill her.

  The Painted Veil is one of those big-themed books that also tells a great story. It’s about infidelity and forgiveness and goodness—and also courage. One of the great pleasures of the book is watching Kitty discover her courage and seeing her realize that it’s not something you have or don’t, like height, but something you can develop.

  “I want to show you my favorite passage,” Mom said, handing me her copy of the book. She was in her usual position on a comfy chair in the treatment room, pillow under her arm, Dixie cup of juice by her side. She had her finger on the part where Kitty is describing the nuns she’s been working for in a Chinese orphanage:

  I can’t tell you how deeply moved I’ve been by all I’ve seen at the convent. They’re wonderful, those nuns, they make me feel utterly worthless. They give up everything, their home, their country, love, children, freedom; and all the little things which I sometimes think must be harder still to give up, flowers and green fields, going for a walk on an autumn day, books and music, comfort, everything they give up, everything. And they do it so that they may devote themselves to a life of sacrifice and poverty, obedience, killing work, and prayer.

  I remembered noting that passage, but I also recalled what came after. I said to Mom: “But Kitty also wonders if maybe the nuns have been duped. What if there is no everlasting life? Then what was the meaning of all the nuns’ sacrifice?”

  Mom frowned. Just as another character corrects Kitty, so she corrected me. In the novel, Kitty is first told to consider the beauty of the nuns’ lives as perfect works of art, no matter what comes after. Then she’s asked to consider a symphony concert, where each musician plays his own instrume
nt, content to add to a symphony that’s no less lovely whether or not there is anyone to hear it. And finally she’s told to contemplate the Tao: “Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

  Mom said, “Kitty admires the nuns’ courage—but she’s every bit as brave as them, braver. The nuns do what they do without fear; she does what she does in spite of it. I think that’s what her friend means when he quotes from the Tao. And besides, the nuns’ reward is in this life and in the life after. They haven’t been duped at all.”

  Thanks to Maugham, or thanks to Kitty, we continued to talk about courage in general and Mom’s in particular. It was something I wanted to discuss, but usually Mom would dismiss instantly anyone’s efforts to portray her as brave; people were always asking her where she got the courage to go to Darfur or to Bosnia while it was being shelled, or to a leper colony.

  “That last question always makes me cross,” Mom said. “Everyone should know that leprosy is very hard to get and completely treatable. Visiting someone who has the flu requires far more bravery.”

  “Is that why you’re always giving people crafts made by lepers—so you can take the opportunity to teach them that?” I asked. My brother and I would gently tease Mom about this proclivity.

  “No, that’s not it at all,” Mom said, just a little indignantly. “I give people crafts made by people with leprosy because they’re so beautiful.”

  And now people were constantly complimenting Mom on her courage in the face of her illness. “You are so brave,” they would say to her. And they would say it to us, too. It became the second c-word. “You mother has so much courage.”