Reading together and having a pleasant journey towards death

When my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, I would often go with her to chemo, and we would usually talk about books.

Discussing what we were reading was something we had done all our lives. But it wasn’t until one day during her second month of treatment that we realised that we had created a very peculiar book club: one with only two members.

That November day, when I arrived at the outpatient care centre, Mom was already there waiting. (She was always a big believer that if you aren’t 10 minutes early, you’re late.) Mom was barely 5-foot-4 – with gray hair (not yet thinning from the chemo) that she never coloured. She liked the gray and also felt it made her less threatening in her travels to the world’s most dangerous places as an advocate for refugees.

I sat in the chair next to her and asked how she was feeling. “A little uncomfortable,” she said. “But I’m not in pain.” After a while, I asked what she was reading. Her answer: a Wallace Stegner novel about the lifelong friendship of two couples, “Crossing to Safety.” It was a book that I’d always pretended to have read, but never actually had. That day, I promised her I’d read it.

From then on, until my mother died almost two years later, at age 75, we read dozens of books of all different kinds: classic novels and modern ones, mysteries, biographies, short-story collections, self-help books, histories. (Mom was thrifty; whatever book someone gave her, she would read.)

We didn’t meet over meals, like so many book clubs, or a set number of times. But we were forced to keep coming back to that waiting room as Mom’s health got worse and worse. And we talked about books just as often as we talked about anything.

My mother was a fast reader, and a slightly odd one. Ever since she was a girl, she had read the end of a book first because she couldn’t wait to learn how things turned out. I realised, when I started writing a book about our book club, that, in a way, she’d already read the end of it – when you have pancreatic cancer that’s been diagnosed after it has spread, you can be fairly certain of what fate has in store.

Sometimes, Mom wanted to talk very specifically about her own death – including what colour ink we should use when answering people who wrote condolence notes (blue, not black, which is too depressing). Sometimes, she wanted to talk about anything. Books gave us a way to talk about death that allowed her to choose how personal or abstract she wanted the conversations to be.

From books to life

One of the books that meant the most to her was Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead.’ The main character, a 75-year-old minister, knows he is dying, and the novel is in the form of a remembrance for his son. In the character of this pastor, Mom had a model of a person whose faith helps him accept death. The book also gave her a bit of an opening to try to persuade me, ever so gently, to give church another try. It had always given her such solace that she wanted the same for me. In true book-club fashion, our conversations about books led to conversations about our lives and life in general.

My mother, Mary Anne Schwalbe, had been an educator who had worked in college admissions and in high schools before devoting herself in her mid-50s to the cause of refugees – as founding director of an organisation that is today known as the Women’s Refugee Commission. Before she died, she wanted to do one more big thing: help raise money for a national library and cultural centre at Kabul University, and for travelling libraries to reach remote villages throughout Afghanistan, a country she had repeatedly visited, and loved.

So ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,’ by Khaled Hosseini, gave us a reason to talk about literacy in Afghanistan. ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ opened a conversation about violence against women. The book that got our club started, Stegner’s ‘Crossing to Safety,’ prompted one of our most important discussions. When Mom said that she was pretty sure that the husband of a character who was dying of cancer would be OK after her death, she wasn’t just talking about that character’s husband – she was, I suspected, talking about my dad as well.

The book club also offered us a chance to travel far beyond the walls of the outpatient care center, even as Mom was stuck there for hours at a time. When we got absorbed by novels like ‘Man Gone Down,’ by Michael Thomas, or ‘The Price of Salt,’ by Patricia Highsmith, or even stories by P G Wodehouse, we discovered that while we were reading, we weren’t a sick person and a well person, but a mother and son sharing a journey together.

I privately dubbed our club ‘The End of Your Life Book Club,’ not to remind myself that Mom was dying, but so I would remember that we all are – that you never know what book or conversation will be your last.

My sister and brother also took turns accompanying Mom to her various medical appointments and treatments. We all learned a huge amount from our mother. Some of the lessons I’ll be thinking about today are these: make your bed every day, even if you don’t feel like it; keep spare gifts in a “present drawer” so you’ll always have something on hand; write thank you notes within hours of receiving gifts; use shelf liner.