The End of Your Life Book Club

  LATER IN AUGUST, I went over one afternoon to Mom and Dad’s apartment to help Mom with some errands. She’d been finding it harder and harder to eat. She’d rediscovered aspic, that classic of the 1950s, and one of my partners at the cooking website had made her some she loved, as had a family friend who was a caterer. Another friend, who’d been married to my father’s best pal, found a shop that sold jellied consommé. It was a return to the 1950s and 1960s, to the fancy dinner party food of Mom’s youth—all those strange, savory gelatinous dishes. Mom could eat corn, too—and friends brought her that. And blueberry muffins, which several people provided. But little else.

  Mom was starting to waste away. She was dramatically thinner and frailer than even a week before, when we’d strolled off to a café a few blocks uptown for muffins, and when Mom had been able to talk for hours on camera to a friend in the building who was making a documentary about women who inspired her. Now, just seven days later, we had one errand: to cross the street and go to the bank’s cash machine. Mom shakily took my hand as we headed out. Every step was deliberate and tentative.

  New York is a place that inspires hypocrisy. When I’m walking, I curse the cabs that race through yellow lights, but I tip generously when I’m late and my driver does just that. And I barrel down busy sidewalks—but now, when I was with my mother, so unsure of each step, so fragile, I couldn’t believe the rudeness of the people who raced by us, swinging their arms or recklessly toting ungainly bags or backpacks. It was terrifying just making it to the corner and crossing the street. No one even paused for the lady with the thin gray hair, so determined still to take part in the life of the city, not yet ready to lie in bed and die.

  My sister was soon back in town, as she’d been so many times over the last two years. Dad took Mom on other trips around the city, as did my brother and sister-in-law and many friends. Mom wouldn’t use a wheelchair or a walker—but she did take a cane. Most errands she did with one of us. Others she insisted on doing on her own—despite everyone’s pleas—like going to a dress shop to get a black dress for my sister. Only later did Nina realize that Mom thought Nina should have something new and smart to wear at Mom’s funeral. My nine-year-old nephew Adrian was studying the Harlem Renaissance—so Mom kept making forays to various galleries to see if she could find him an affordable print by James Van Der Zee, one of the great photographers of the 1920s and beyond. She couldn’t, but kept trying.

  Mom and I found ourselves talking more and more about the conversations she had every day with her grandchildren. It’s not an exaggeration to say that she lived for them, especially in her final weeks.

  Friends came over, and she continued with alternative treatments—the biofeedback and also Reiki massage. A former student sent her lots of information about New Age philosophy and psychics. “Your father would have a fit,” she said to me. But Mom was open to it and touched by how much this young woman cared, though she never did go to a psychic.

  MY FATHER ACTUALLY had very few fits anymore. He’s a big man with a big personality, but he tiptoed through the house so as not to disturb Mom when she was resting. His office is a few blocks away, and Mom had to beg him not to come home during the day—he was approaching his eighty-second birthday, and she was worried about him charging around in the August heat.

  Some of Mom and Dad’s friends and family expressed surprise at the depth of his care and devotion. Theirs had been one of those relationships where he was known as the difficult one. Dad was irascible; Mom made peace. Dad had limited patience for noisy children and people asking for favors; Mom was endlessly welcoming. Dad talked to select people; Mom to everyone.

  Yet throughout their lives together, Dad’s anger was frequently on behalf of Mom—he was always ferociously protective of her. They enjoyed each other’s company; they made each other laugh; they loved most of the same things—sharing remarkably similar tastes in music and art—and many of the same people.

  All you had to do was to talk with one when the other was away to see how much they worried about each other and missed each other. In private, Dad has always been generous and even sentimental: his opposition to Mom’s endless stream of good works usually took the form of proud teasing, which almost always made her smile. And when he got too obstreperous or opinionated, she could usually control him with an “Oh, Douglas!” and a look that was more loving than stern.

  Actually, a large percentage of Dad’s volatility has always been purely for show. In fiercely liberal Cambridge, he delighted in telling everyone he’d voted for Richard Nixon; only a few years ago did he admit that he hadn’t. It was just too much fun for him to see the reactions. He also jokingly referred to himself as the meanest dad in Cambridge, based on the occasional philosophical positions he would take, such as asking kids who were trick-or-treating for UNICEF to choose between candy and a donation. “The idea is to see if you are willing to give up candy in favor of a donation to starving children,” he would instruct some candy-crazed child in a witch costume, “not to see if I’ll give you candy and a donation. So which is it?” It was always the candy, proving a point to Dad but making Mom shake her head in aggravation in the background.

  But as her illness progressed, he no longer insisted on this type of social experiment; he answered the phone (which he still hated) and was even polite to the dozens of callers. From time to time, my mother insisted my father go out to dinner with my brother and me. But other than that, he was home every night, with as much dinner as Mom would eat.

  ON MONDAY, AUGUST 24, Mom sent me a new post for the blog. She’d written it, as she’d written all the others, but she was anxious about this one. Did I think it was okay? “Please edit or tell me if it’s a bad idea.” I told her I thought it was a terrific idea. It was titled “Hospice and Health Care.”

  Mom wants everyone to know that she has an excellent Hospice team—nurse, social worker, nutritionist—who are taking good care of her. And, with Dad’s help and a dose of Ritalin, she has been able to get to some morning Mostly Mozart rehearsals and two afternoon performances. She is not going out in the evening anymore.

  We see the doctor next week and will have another medical report after that.

  But she also wanted anyone reading this to put full support behind some kind of health care reform. She feels she is so blessed with the care she has received and that it is terribly unfair that people who have worked as hard as she has have no access to care—either because they have lost their jobs or had jobs that didn’t provide insurance or have pre-existing conditions that do not allow them to get (or afford) insurance. There is no perfect solution, but some kind of bill has to be passed this fall.

  We all send our best to all friends and family.

  As word got out, through the blog and otherwise, that Mom was in hospice care, most people correctly understood that meant Mom’s death would be very soon—so more and more messages came in. I learned anew a valuable lesson: send those messages. Mom loved reading emails and hearing directly, or through us, from people whose lives she touched. Because she knew I would be writing about her, she started to share them with me.

  The following email had come from David Rohde in early August:

  Mary Anne:

  Thanks so much for your notes. My apologies for not responding to your first message. We went up to Maine to visit family after Madeline and Judson’s wedding. Unfortunately, I fell way behind on my email. It was wonderful to see you at the wedding. You looked well. At times, I thought of my imprisonment as a long battle with cancer. I didn’t know the outcome, but knew I had to continue to do my best to survive. I was treated well by the Taliban. As I told you, I was never beaten. I was given bottled water and they even allowed me to walk in a small yard each day. In short, I never experienced the physical pain you are suffering.

  In some ways, captivity is easier than cancer. I could try to talk to them, at least, and appeal to their humanity. You can’t have a conversation with a disease. Your courage through all of
this inspires me. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you. I’d be happy to get together at any time—if you’re eager to hear stories about the Taliban that will take your mind to other places. If not, I completely understand. Rest. Relax. Do not reply to this email. Your body needs time to recover. As a prisoner, I realized that the basics—sleeping and eating—were the most important things in keeping me going.

  I’m sending prayers your way, just as you sent prayers my way. In the end, we decided our fate was in God’s hands. We fought, of course, but we knew God would decide what happened to us. That gave us comfort in what seemed an impossible situation. Then—suddenly and against all expectations—we escaped and survived. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you the same.

  Best,

  David

  Too Much Happiness

  There were no doctor appointments in the last weeks of August, so our book club met at Mom and Dad’s home while Dad was at his office.

  On this late August day, I had come over to help with errands, and then, when I finished, I sat next to Mom on the sofa, and we both prepared to read. First we had to find her reading glasses. She’d misplaced them. She always used cheap ones, from the drugstore. After her death, Doug and Nina and I would go through the apartment to gather them. We found twenty-seven pairs, tucked away everywhere: in cushions, in cabinets, in drawers and pockets, behind vases and frames. Every time she misplaced a pair, she’d buy another.

  Today, we find a pair—and she’s excited to be reading The Miracle at Speedy Motors, a new mystery by Alexander McCall Smith from his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Mom soon comes across a passage she wants to show me, and hands the book over to me, finger-marking a place:

  Mma Makutsi was right about villages, even the bigger ones, like Mochudi, where Mma Romtswe had been born. Those places were still intimate enough for a rough description to suffice. If somebody had written a letter addressed to “That man who wears the hat, the one who was a miner and knows a lot about cattle, Mochudi, Botswana,” it would undoubtedly have been correctly delivered to her father.

  This passage makes me smile. I know Mom is watching my face as I read it, waiting for me to show that I enjoy it. But that’s not enough, of course. We need to discuss it.

  “That’s wonderful,” I say. “You really feel you know the place. It’s a great description.”

  “I went to so many villages like that when I was in Africa,” says Mom. “He’s got it absolutely right.”

  When I looked at Mom in that moment, I saw not a sick person, but not quite the same Mom I’d known all my life. After reading so much together, and after so many hours together in doctor’s offices, I felt I’d met a slightly different person, a new person, someone quirkier and funnier. I was going to miss my mother dreadfully but also miss this new person, too—miss getting to know her better.

  Mom had one more thing she wanted to show me that day, before I left, and one more thing she wanted to tell me. First: There was a new edit of the video my friend had shot in Kabul. The video now began with two large bags of books being stowed in the back of a car; it showed a pine bookshelf being lashed to the top of the car; then it followed the car as it made its way to a school an hour from central Kabul. It showed dozens of Afghan girls reading books and laughing and pointing out passages to one another, and beaming with pride as Nancy Hatch Dupree looked on. They were reading, really reading, real books. Sure, there were only five hundred books for eight thousand students. But they’d never had any books at all before.

  As for the one other thing Mom wanted to tell me that day:

  “You mustn’t let my frequent flyer miles go to waste after I’m gone. I’ll give you my passwords. Delta is for you; BA for your brother; American Airlines for your sister.”

  DAD’S EIGHTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY was at the end of the month, and we had a small dinner party for him. On my way out the door, Mom stopped me. She wanted to know if I’d remembered to call one of her former students who was moving to New York and wanted some job advice. I told her I had. Then she whispered something to me, with a conspiratorial smile: “A friend left me a plant—to help me have an appetite. I made it into a tea just like she said. But I didn’t like it, so I’m not doing that again.”

  It took me a minute to figure out that Mom was talking about marijuana. We’d occasionally teased her and Dad for being the only two people we knew in Cambridge in the 1960s who were progressive Democrats and who’d never tried pot. Once when I asked her why they hadn’t, she said it was because no one ever offered it to them. I have a hard time believing that.

  NOW THAT WE’D finished the Updike, and Big Machine, and the McCall Smith (well, she had—I was behind), it was time to decide on a new book.

  We had two lined up: Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price, a collection of short pieces that this great American novelist had been delivering aloud on National Public Radio since 1995; and Too Much Happiness, a new collection of Alice Munro stories. It had just been published in England but not yet in America; a friend of Mom’s had brought her a copy.

  Our last visit to Dr. O’Reilly was on September 1. I have no recollection whatsoever of what we talked about. There just can’t have been that much to say. The next day, I went over to have lunch with Mom, or to have lunch while Mom sat and watched me. She was down to ninety-four pounds and trying to eat but not able to do much more than have a few bites of something, or a little soup.

  I was due to fly to San Francisco for a quick trip the next week and wasn’t at all sure I should go. My trip was to meet with venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley to see if I could convince someone to add funding to the business. The website was going fairly well, but we were desperately in need of cash. Mom was adamant that I should go on the trip and not worry about her—she was feeling a little better, she said.

  We talked, that day, about family, plans, and an upcoming show of one of my sister-in-law’s paintings. The second-richest family in India had commissioned Nancy to do a giant mural for the ballroom of the house they were building in Mumbai, which would be the tallest private house in the world; Nancy was going to display the mural in her studio, for family and a few friends, before shipping it off. Mom didn’t want to miss that—and neither did I, so I would fly back in time to see it. Nina was coming in for a few days to see Mom—so she’d be able to see it too. As Mom and I talked about Nancy’s show and everything else, it seemed like a normal family day, devoted not to literature or to melancholy, just to logistics, with Mom in her role as air traffic control, directing all the various comings and goings of the family. She was still looking ahead, and so I took my cues from her. Did she want to talk about how she was feeling? Not today. Today she wanted to plan.

  Even the books were scheduled. I would take the Price on my trip, as Mom had already read most of it; she would read the Munro while I was gone and then loan it to me.

  THAT MONDAY, LABOR Day, I flew to San Francisco to stay with an old college friend and go to my meetings. I had no idea how tired I was—most of the first evening, Labor Day, I spent in his living room, reading, dozing off, and listening to his monster stereo. When I called Mom the next day, she could talk only for a few minutes. She really wasn’t feeling great.

  I finished the Reynolds Price—fifty-two brief personal essays. Price describes an unusual childhood and looks back on himself in a cowboy uniform but with a Shirley Temple doll. He writes about the England that Mom loved in the 1950s, when “professional theater was incomparably brilliant, and ticket prices were laughably small,” and includes a very moving tribute to teachers. He recounts his obsession with being on time and his frantic worry for (and growing irritation with) people who aren’t. And he reflects, amid chapters on more mundane topics, on sickness—on the devastation and sadness of AIDS, on being in a wheelchair, and on death. “We’ve reached a point in American history when death has become almost the last obscenity. Have you noticed how many of us refuse to say ‘he or she
died’? We’re far more likely to say ‘she passed away,’ as though death were a sterile process of modest preparation, followed by shrink-wrapping, then rapid transit—where? Well, elsewhere. In short, it’s the single thing we’re loath to discuss in public.” That page was dog-eared by Mom.

  My first day of meetings with the venture capitalists was not fun. I’d come from the world of books, which was a big strike against me. It was like walking into Boeing and seeking a job with a résumé full of experience with horses and carriages. That afternoon I called Mom again, and we had a quick chat. She didn’t sound like she was any better, but she told me she was.

  I slept uneasily and woke up early for my second day of meetings. When I called Mom, she was clearly in pain and could talk only a minute. But she wanted to know how the meetings were going—and wanted to tell me that under no circumstance was I to cut my trip short. I still had two more days of meetings scheduled. When I called again later in the day, she mentioned that she’d stopped eating. I canceled everything and drove straight to the airport to catch the redeye home.

  There is no place more perfectly lonely than an airport at night when you fear someone you love is dying and you’re rushing to see that person. I drank two Scotches, took an Ambien, woke up in New York, and took a cab straight to Mom and Dad’s apartment.

  I’D CALLED DAD to tell him I was rushing home. The fact that he didn’t advise me not to told me all I needed to know about how much things had deteriorated over the last forty-eight hours. My sister arrived at our parents’ apartment a few hours before me. She was sitting next to Mom, who was upright in bed in her bedroom when I walked in. I saw a look of real anger flash across Mom’s face.