The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  “I wonder,” I said, unwilling to cede the point.

  My brother was hardly a prodigal son. He always had a job and was raising three terrific kids. And yet he is wilder and freer than I am—more demonstrative and probably more honest. With his thick dark hair, he was always a bit more Rhett, and I tended more toward Ashley. (Okay, he’s not Clark Gable and I’m not Leslie Howard, but the point is in the contrast.) So at times he’s been further out than me. He occasionally had arguments and points of friction between him and our parents that I never had. And when he returned—hours or days later, as affectionate and voluble as ever—there was a relief and joy that made me feel, well, jealous. Prodigal son. Other son. After Mom and I had discussed Home, I joked with my brother that I wished I could be a little more prodigal. He assured me that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He also pointed out to me something I’d missed about the book club: Mom had finally succeeded in getting me to talk about faith and religion and even Bible stories, something she’d been trying to do for years.

  NOW THAT MOM had a port installed in her chest, it meant that instead of hours of chemo every few weeks, she would for a few days every fortnight wander around her apartment and the city with a bottle strapped to her midriff. She jokingly told everyone she felt like a suicide bomber. “But no complaints!” she was always careful to add.

  She was also jumpier than I’d ever seen her—but this wasn’t due to the new treatment; it was anxiety in the last weeks leading up to the presidential election. Mom was beside herself. One of her friends, a renowned psychologist who is active in the Democratic party and who had a son working for the Obama campaign, spent hours with Mom analyzing every fluctuation in the polls and was usually able to reassure her when the numbers didn’t look good. But if it wasn’t for Ambien, I don’t think Mom would have slept at all. She told all of us that if Obama didn’t win, she was leaving the country, cancer or no.

  “Have you read Obama’s memoir?” she asked me during one of our morning calls.

  I hadn’t yet.

  “You have to,” she said.

  I promised I would.

  “I mean it, Will. I can’t believe you haven’t. You’ll love it.”

  In the months leading up to the election, to an extent I freely admitted to myself, I’d come to place tremendous significance on a connection between an Obama victory and Mom’s prognosis. It wasn’t superstition—I was desperately worried about Mom’s mood if he lost the election. I thought particularly about Kabat-Zinn’s research and the proven links between depression and health.

  As soon as I heard Obama had won, I was filled with hope. I knew Mom wouldn’t get well, but now I allowed myself to believe that she would have months where she would be better. Maybe it was superstitious after all.

  MOM WAS ON an incredible no-Ritalin-necessary high for the next week. A trip to the hospital didn’t even dampen her spirits: she was just dehydrated, a side effect of all the pills she was taking. The annual International Rescue Committee Freedom Award dinner was now days away. She was going to be well for that, she was sure.

  The day before the dinner, I finally discovered, hiding under the bed, the Kabat-Zinn book I’d been trying to find for weeks: Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. It’s another massive book.

  The page I’d marked, and wanted to show Mom, was about interruptions. It’s a section where Kabat-Zinn points out that we all know it’s wrong to interrupt each other. And yet we constantly interrupt ourselves. We do it when we check our emails incessantly—or won’t simply let a phone go to voicemail when we’re doing something we enjoy—or when we don’t think a thought through, but allow our minds to fix on temporary concerns or desires.

  In however much time I had left with Mom, I realized, I needed to focus more—to be careful not to interrupt our conversations with other conversations. Every hospital is, as I’ve noted, an interruption machine—a flood of people come to poke you and prod you and ask you questions. But modern life itself is an interruption machine: phone calls, emails, texts, news, television, and our own restless minds. The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention—yet I’d been constantly dividing mine. No one was getting it, not even me.

  The morning of the IRC dinner, I called Mom to find out when she planned to arrive. “Just before the food is served,” she said. “To preserve my strength. I don’t think I can stand around through the cocktails.” Held in the cavernous gilded ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the dinner and award ceremony were powerful and moving as always. Throughout the evening, I watched Mom greet people, dozens and dozens of people.

  How do you do that? How do you talk to fifty or a hundred different people without interrupting them or yourself? And I understood suddenly what Kabat-Zinn means about mindfulness—it isn’t a trick or a gimmick. It’s being present in the moment. When I’m with you, I’m with you. Right now. That’s all. No more and no less.

  Before dessert they showed a video called Refugee Journeys, which ends with a montage of a refugee mother embracing her children as she is reunited with them. One thousand people in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel wept as they watched it. Friends at our table were sobbing. It was a very emotional night.

  Kabat-Zinn writes, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

  OBAMA HAD BEEN elected president. The Freedom Awards dinner was a triumph, and Mom had been there to enjoy it. The C. diff. seemed genuinely gone. And, after months of work, and with a lot of help, my website partners (a digital-guru friend from college and a more recent pal from publishing) and I had even launched the cooking site, without a glitch. Now Thanksgiving—still my favorite holiday—was almost upon us.

  The information my siblings and I had gleaned from the Internet had said people with metastatic pancreatic cancer usually didn’t make it past six months. Mom was well past a year. That Friday I would accompany her on a visit to the doctor for another installation of the “suicide bomber” bottle, and so our book club would have its next meeting. She was eager to tell the doctor how well she was feeling—she knew Dr. O’Reilly would be pleased. And to thank her for the Ritalin—it had made a difference, Mom thought, in helping her enjoy the IRC dinner.

  Her appointment was set for eleven fifteen. I arrived at ten forty-five, in case they could see her early, as they sometimes could. When I got to the waiting room, Mom was in her usual seat. But she looked just awful. Something had gone wrong.

  “Have you heard about David?” she asked me. I had so many Davids in my life, I had to ask her which one. “David Rohde, the young New York Times reporter,” she said. “My friend and fellow board member on the Afghan project.”

  “No, what’s wrong?”

  “He’s been kidnapped in Afghanistan. He was there researching his book. It’s just hideous and everyone is frantic. But you can’t say anything to anyone. They need to keep it completely secret. They feel that’s the only chance they have for getting him out.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “From other board members who heard from Nancy.” Mom was referring to Nancy Hatch Dupree, who was still in Afghanistan, working on plans for the library. “David and Nancy had dinner in Kabul just a few nights ago. She says she told him she didn’t think it was safe for him to go where he wanted to go. But he said he needed some more information for his book. And he had a lot of trust in the people who were helping him. Damn,” she said. My mother never said “damn.”

  We sat in silence. She bit her lower lip.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a while. “I really wanted to talk about the Obama book today and the Mann. But I’m afraid just now I can’t concentrate on anything else. You know, David was just married a few months ago—Kristen must be beside herself. I’ll send her a note as soon as I get home. And I’ll ask Nancy if there’s anything we can do. And when I’m done with all that, I’ll pray.”

  Mom had prayer. I would have to try to make do with mi
ndfulness. It didn’t seem like there was going to be anything else we could do to help. But that wasn’t the way my mother’s mind worked.

  “The worse it gets in Afghanistan,” she added, “the more convinced I am that we need to see this library project through. It may not be the biggest thing we can do, but it’s something. And we’ve just got to do something.”

  This, I finally realized, was how Mom was able to focus when I was not. It was how she was able to be present with me, present with the people at a benefit or the hospital. She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done. I had to learn this lesson while she was still there to teach me.

  Kokoro

  That autumn, right after the election, in between everything else we were reading, we found ourselves turning back, from time to time, to short stories—ones that ran in The New Yorker, anthologies, and the Somerset Maugham stories I’d picked up in Vero Beach.

  There was one Maugham story in particular that we loved: “The Verger.”

  Like so many of Maugham’s stories, “The Verger” makes you smile. It starts with a humble man being suddenly fired from the only job he’s ever known when a new job requirement is imposed from above. I think part of the reason Mom loved this story is that it’s about fate and the surprisingly happy turns that life can take, financial and otherwise; after losing his job, things go fantastically well for the protagonist. Because Mom had deeply involved herself with people whose lives had been turned upside down, she found that stories of people whose lives were then turned right side up held enormous appeal.

  “The Verger” had a special irony in November 2008: the financial world was crumbling around us, the stock market was a disaster, Lehman Brothers had just failed, and the U.S. car industry was on the verge of bankruptcy. At the end of the story, a banker urges our now rich hero to take all his cash deposits and put them into “gilt-edged securities,” which fortunately he both won’t and, in a sly twist, can’t do.

  We spent a fair bit of book club time talking about the market and the global financial collapse. It was hard not to, as the paper was filled with news of it every day, and both of us were avid newspaper readers. The collapse also had particular resonance for me, as I was still trying to get funding for the newly launched but barely funded website. Needless to say, there was no one at the time writing checks, and I began to doubt my wisdom and sanity as I poured more and more of my own savings into the venture.

  Sometimes as we sat there, me drinking my mocha, staring out at the gray November sky, when we ran out of things to talk about, I would check the little stock ticker on my iPhone and announce the bad news to Mom (and several other people around us, who were curious). The market was down 100 points, or 200, or 300. Mom had a grim fascination with it. She certainly wanted to know the news, but it couldn’t help but depress her. She wanted to leave money behind for us, for the grandkids’ college funds, and she wanted money to go to her favorite charities. She had given me a list of charities to receive money in lieu of flowers that I was to mention in her paid obituary. But she’d been on so many boards, in addition to the worthy places where she’d worked, that she found it difficult to narrow down the list, so periodically she would give me an institution or charity that she wanted to add, and then another, and then another—and then think twice and take the number back down to four or five, but always trying to feature a mix of different types and include ones that hadn’t received her full attention over the last few years.

  Because my venture was a cooking website, I found myself talking a great deal about cooks and cookbooks and recipes. And all this around Mom, who had increasing difficulty finding anything she could bear to eat. One friend had brought her hot chocolate from Venice. She’d liked that—so we searched the city for similarly rich chocolate for her. She also liked Jell-O. And soup, so long as it was broth soup and not cream soup. But she continued to have dinner parties, at which she would eat as much as she could. And she was determined to have Thanksgiving dinner. It would be small. Family and a few friends. But unlike last year, when she hadn’t been well enough to go to Tom and Andy’s, she would host it. My brother’s first wife, Fabienne, with whom we’d all stayed very close—Mom had even traveled to Europe for her wedding to her new husband two years before—had come from Paris just to see Mom, and she would be there. (Fabienne is the mother of Nico, the oldest grandchild.) We’d start early and end early. But there would be turkey, and pies, and Brussels sprouts, and sweet potatoes.

  “Are you sure you’re up to hosting this, Mom?” we all asked her.

  “If I don’t feel well, I’ll just go in the back. But I have so much to be thankful for this year. I wasn’t at all sure I would still be here. And I think of other people who can’t be here. I’ve been praying David Rohde would be home for Thanksgiving, but it just doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So now I’m praying for something different. I’m praying for him to be back with Kristen for Christmas.”

  Mom had continued to be in touch with Nancy Hatch Dupree about David, but as everyone was still convinced that the best thing for David was to keep everything quiet, she couldn’t talk to anyone else. Nancy had received word through her channels that he was probably, for the moment, as okay as you can be when you’ve been kidnapped by the Taliban. But whatever could be done for him would take a very long time. Whenever Mom mentioned David to me, she reminded me that I couldn’t tell a soul. She even started to refer to him as “our young friend” to avoid saying his name. Nancy was remarkably confident that he would eventually come back—but she told Mom that the situation in the whole region had gone rapidly downhill. Peshawar, where she lived much of the time, she called the capital of kidnappings—and said she went out only when it was completely necessary.

  Nancy’s optimism gave Mom a great deal of hope—and now she checked her email every few hours for news of David. She’d also added him to her daily prayers—and to the weekly church prayers, so that the whole congregation could pray for him, though just as “David” to preserve his anonymity. Obama’s election had preoccupied Mom for the better part of a year, and now David’s kidnapping began to play, in some way, the same kind of role in her life. It wasn’t that David and Mom had known each other all that well or for all that long. But she considered him a new and fast friend and, as she did all old-fashioned reporters, a great force for good in the world.

  I DON’T REMEMBER Thanksgiving dinner very well. I do remember that right before dinner, Mom told me that she’d gone with Dad to see the columbarium in the church where she wanted her ashes and where he wanted his. I remember it was cold and that Mom was excited about food for the first time in a long time, although mostly about the leftovers—she told me she was going to make turkey soup with the carcass of the bird and combine the leftover meat with mushrooms, peas, and cream for a turkey à la king.

  She seemed remarkably well at dinner, but I do recall looking over and seeing her fade, noticeably, several times. The color would drain from her face, and her eyelids would droop heavily, even as she struggled to keep them open. Then it would be as if a jolt of electricity went through her, as if someone flicked a switch. The color would come back, her eyelids would open, and her posture would strengthen. She had been gone for a second or two—but now was back. And her smile would come back too.

  AFTER THANKSGIVING, MOM was even more surrounded by family and friends than usual, and she was usually surrounded by them. Earlier in her illness, she’d wanted a certain amount of time alone. Now she was almost never alone. That was fine with her.

  Once, when I was fourteen, I decided to go to Lincoln Center and sit on a bench. Some image of romantic loneliness was swirling in my head, me on a bench beside the stilled fountain. I remember that day as both brisk and sunny, so that if you sat still,
you could stay warm off your own body heat trapped inside the various layers of your clothing. There I sat. I was terribly impressed with myself. I was watching people. I was gloriously alone. Then someone else sat down on my bench, a woman with gray hair, perhaps in her seventies or maybe eighties. She looked somewhat disheveled. I prayed she wouldn’t talk to me. She did.

  “Do you have any friends?” she asked.

  I said I did, lots of them.

  “Well then, what are you doing sitting all alone? You should be with your friends.”

  I thought back to that as I sat with Mom, waiting to see Dr. O’Reilly. Most people around us were there with a son, a daughter, a spouse, a friend. But there were also those who came alone, who had to take their coat with them when they went in to have their blood drawn, or ask a stranger to keep an eye.

  I was thinking a lot about loneliness, because we were now reading Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki, which was published in 1914 and was one of fourteen novels Soseki wrote after retiring from a professorship at Tokyo’s Imperial University. It was a book I’d read once before, in college, when I’d taken a course from its translator, Edwin McClellan. I’d been struck by Soseki’s exploration of the complex nature of friendship, especially among people who aren’t equals, in this case a student and his teacher. I wanted Mom to read it, and to read it again myself.

  When we talked about the novel, we discovered that we both had been startled by the same quote, an explanation of loneliness the teacher tells to the young man. The teacher says: “Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” The young man can’t think of anything to say in response. The truth of the statement is too stark for him.

  Had Mom ever been lonely? I asked her. No, she said. There were times as head of the Women’s Commission when she grew sick of the traveling and wanted to be home, such as when she’d found herself stuck in a remote refugee camp in West Africa for weeks longer than planned. But missing people and being lonely, she pointed out, are two separate things.