I'll just admit it now: I sobbed at the end of this book.
I'm typing this post a mere 5 minutes after getting up to discard the wet pile of napkins I accumulated. There's an open tray of Belgian Butter Waffle Cookies and an open jar of Speculoos Cookie Butter, both from Trader Joe's, lying near Will Schwalbe's New York Times Bestselling work, The End of Your Life Book Club. The book is filled with tabs marking passages I liked and moments I identified with. There are a thousand thoughts zipping through my head right now as I think about where to begin, what to say, how to identify where my feelings are coming from. It's 2:45AM and I can't go to sleep without roundly giving this book an A-.
An A-, say what? How is it that a book so deeply affecting could merit deductions? If I could judge the book separately on it's content versus emotional gravity, it would earn a B for the former and an A+ for the latter. As I read the last few pages, simultaneously aware that there was no surprise ending and willing myself to jump in and let Mr. Schwalbe tell his story, I realized that I was crying not because the world lost his mother, Mary Ann, but because I was imagining the loss of my own mother. I was doing what I've been doing ever since I can remember: I was projecting my parents' death onto the present and exposing my greatest fear.
Now that I'm 24, I don't really have dreams or nightmares. No matter how close to bedtime I eat, or how bad or good the day had been, I'm always able to sleep through the night. That wasn't always the case. For a longest time, I kept having nightmares when I was younger. They weren't necessarily about being chased by a killer, or seeing myself die, they--the ones I woke up crying to--were always about my parents, especially my mother dying. I'd always wake up mid-dream and run to my parents' bedroom, crying to my mother. She would always wake up and listen to the dream and, as we laid there, she would hug me and tell me it was all just a dream. I'd fall asleep and spend the rest of the night by her side. As I got older and the dreams were less frequent, I tried to figure out the meanings behind the nightmares. I had heard about Freud, so for awhile I was worried that those dreams were a manifestation of some dark and twisted subconscious desire I had to see my parents gone. But that's not who I am at all. If anything, those dreams were the work of some evil force putting the worst possible scenes in my head in the time I was most vulnerable--asleep. Losing my parents was unfathomable then, and only recently have thoughts about their mortality begun to pop up every now and then.
Looking back, I don't think I ever gave much thought to what emotional turmoil death really involves. My parents have always been young and vibrant in my mind, even when they got injured or sick I always knew they'd bounce back in no time and our family could continue to live the same way we always have. It's not a kid's job to have to worry about their parents' mortality, and I certainly did not grow up with those worries. Even as recently as a few months ago, I was blithely unconcerned. Our family has always been a fairly tight foursome and I couldn't imagine the relationships and roles we play changing.
The turning point was when my dad turned 60 in May. We went to Las Vegas for a week, and I was surprised that a lot had changed, most of all my dad. He used to love Las Vegas. He went with his friends growing up, and for awhile he accompanied my grandparents on their quarterly trips. Before he had asked us if we wanted to go, I didn't give "60" much thought. I thought we'd approach his birthday like any other year (minimal presents, nice dinner, maybe give him a new family photo for his office). He, apparently, saw 60 as a milestone, and because he normally never ever asks for anything, we said yes. Even when we were there, it didn't hit me just how much that trip meant to him, despite the fact that he kept thanking us. It's funny how, once someone points out the elephant in the room, all you can think about from that point on is the elephant. When I realized how much being 60 meant for him, symbolically, physically or otherwise, I began to see other signs of change in his life. How he has continued to give work 110% of his effort, even as guys his age have long since retired. How he approaches the gym with such conviction, trying to lose weight and stay healthy. How he take extra time to thank us for small gestures like his birthday and Father's Day this past week. How he never refuses extra family duties, such as booking flights or looking into alternative eye treatments for my mom. He has always supported us financially, yet he asks for so little. I haven't had a serious talk with him about what he's going through at this time in his life, but it resembles grace to me. The way he's spent 30 years proving to my mom that he's grown up. The way he continues to chug on as though he's still the father of two teenagers. If anything, my dad seems determined to be indefatigable. I think that comes from a place of peace and purity, not obligation. (Dammit I'm crying again.)
Whether someone gets to that point out of wisdom and years of living, or because they wake up realize they're 60, I think we all eventually confront the idea of dying. Not the abstract idea we have to discuss in philosophy, but the physical death, maybe the realization that you only have a few decades to live if you can make it to life expectancy standards. Death is a very powerful agent in our lives. We all know it will happen, but we don't know when, how, where, etc. For most of our lives we go about our daily routines without considering entropy and randomness of disaster. We don't always make the most of every moment, and we probably spend a lot of time engaging in time-wasting activities, relationships, multi-tasking, etc. The sad part about it is that people commonly regret those moments when they're on the cusp of death. And why shouldn't they? It seems perfectly natural to lament the years, days, hours, seconds, even, spent on the "wrong" path. We live in the present and our lives are the cumulative result of everything that has happened in the past, yet we wish we could isolate regrettable moments and replace them with heroism, action or inaction. In the end, the ultimate choice is whether we die with regret on our breath, or look ahead to the promise of what's in store.
Then there's the issue of what it's like to lose a loved one, which is the realm I've been floating around my entire life. The most immediate relative I know who has died is my grandpa, 7 years ago. My grandpa was a silent man, very stoic and unwavering. Even though my brother and I would go over to my grandparents' house frequently on weekends while my parents went out, most of the interaction was with my grandma who would cook for us and bring us blankets. My grandpa was always either on the reclining sofa or sitting on the floor surrounded my newspaper clippings Altogether, I didn't know much about him, so when he died, none of that phased me. Simultaneously, I could cry on a dime just thinking about the worst case scenarios happening to my parents. Perhaps I had a shallow connection to death--that grief was directly related to how well I knew a person.
If you think about it, death is all around us (this is actually an idea pulled from Michael Pollan's book Cooked). We eat dead plants, animals, fungi, etc., dead stuff powers our cars and electricity, and every participant in natural selection is familiar with the idea that sometimes it is necessary to eliminate a competitor to perpetuate your genes. Death is a necessary part of the life cycle. If it's distilled down to scientific terms then all you have to look forward to is biodegrading and joining the carbon cycle. But if you allow philosophy and religion into the picture, death becomes more than a necessity, it becomes a burden, a major marker in the lives of those around the deceased, a threat and a motivator. In a way, death is a reason and means for living.
Since we all have death in common, we can all also appreciate Mr. Schwalbe's book about books and the impact they have. There is no great mystery--it's a given that the author's mother is going to die of pancreatic cancer, so it's just a matter of when. By reading and sharing books, the author and his mother are able to distract from and confront her illness and the end of her life. The real adventure, I came to find out, is not the ways in which cancer and cancer treatment can ravage one's body, but how books can transform relationships, how great works can teach you lessons and how you can find relevance in the experiences of others through books.
It was almost two years from Mary Ann's diagnosis to her death, which certainly defied the "up to six months" rule of thumb for patients in stage 4. Yet the author never went to great lengths to portray his mother as a stereotypical cancer fighter. Yes, she lived a great deal longer than was expected given her diagnosis, and yes she continued to work up until her death, but she never did advocate for cancer research funding or actually start an organization to raise awareness for early detection. For someone of her status in the academic and philanthropic communities, she could have done a lot more to help aid workers. Perhaps it's a little nitpicky to point out that she chose refugees causes over cancer awareness.
What bothered me most about the book was that, of all the positive outcomes she could have wished and prayed for in the world before she died, she chose a) the safe return of her friend, journalist David Rohde who had been captured in Afghanistan and b) for Obama to win the 2008 presidential election. Both things came true, and Mary Ann was even around to see the Obamacare Bill introduced in Washington. (From the start of her treatment all the way till the end, she was an outspoken supporter of socialized healthcare. She used her illness as a launching point to stir emotions.) Mary Ann was, like much of America in 2008, obsessed with Obama. Like every "progressive Democrat" all she could talk about leading up to the election was how awesome he was and how important the election was. Then, when he got elected, her focus turned with his to nationalizing the healthcare system. Despite the ongoing economic woes, both Obama and Mary Ann were obsessed with passing the bill.
What's most disturbing about who Mary Ann was is that she was active in refugee and women's rights causes, yet her focus was on other countries, rather than our own. Yes, it is admirable that she chose to spend so much time helping Middle Eastern school children or refugees from Burma, but why didn't she also try to support American causes as well? Starvation exists here and it's much more prevalent than most people could imagine, but, like every celebrity (Angelina Jolie comes to mind), everything is about directing money to foreign countries, despite the suffering that happens in our own communities. And not once did I hear mention that Mary Ann wanted to bring down the very dictatorships oppressing the people she kept helping. Mary Ann ended up, in my mind, as such a contradiction. Rather than focus on preventative care or cancer screening, her focus was on palliative care. Rather than speak about a strong US foreign policy stance, she took foreign aid missions. It was almost like she had a Mother Teresa complex where she wanted to be the one seen saving the children, but did not do so for the "bigger picture."
What was even more uncomfortable for me was the prosperity and power that the Schwalbe family possessed. Mary Ann was portrayed as having connections, and in some ways it seemed her job was to socialize and get in everyone else's business. Everyone was a cause that had to be helped. What seems like a generosity of spirit really seemed to me like an obsession with ethnic people and minority groups. Knowing that education is so important in the future of the US as a global leader, Mary Ann instead used her resources and connections to acquire scholarships for foreigners, scholarships which, I think, should have gone to underprivileged American students. The family as a whole wielded a fair amount of social power, and they leveraged their connections to create opportunities to support charities of their choice. Essentially, they weren't starting from nothing, and it seemed they had no shortage of money or resources to satisfy all of their wants (trips to London, Florida, rounds and rounds of chemotherapy, not to mention living in Manhattan). This wasn't a story about a family who had very little and defied the odds, it was the story of a well-off family who saw it as their life's duty to help the less fortunate, provided they were from foreign countries.
To return to my feelings at the end of the book, I realized that I wasn't crying for Will or his mother, but because I thought about my own mother dying. (Honestly, I was getting tired of Mary Ann's never-ending soirees, award ceremonies and fundraisers, and I kept checking to see how many more pages I had to go before the ending of the book where she, you know.) There were parts of the book that reminded me of lessons my mother taught me, or things she would say growing up. The only connection I had with Will and his mother was that, like me and my mother, they were mother-and-son. As Mary Ann endured treatment after treatment and setback after setback, I imagined what it would be like to have to go through that with my own mother. Of course, in the end, I could not stop crying because I imagined what it would be like at her end. So, do I think that Schwalbe is a "good" author? I'm not sure. He told the story of his mother, but the attachment I have to this book is purely based on my own real-life feelings and my tendency to project. He wrapped up the story concisely and without the drama portrayed in cinema, but the rest of the book was only ho-hum. Sure, he and his mother read a lot of great books (some of which I intend to pick up), and I loved that it was about the power of books, but I can't look past the idiosyncrasies and annoying Obama-Obama-Obama speeches.
Final Rating: B+
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