"The End of Your Life Book Club"

February 4, 2013

"No matter how tired I am, I can always read," says Mary Anne Schwalbe to her son while waiting for an appointment with her oncologist in The End of Your Life Book Club. "But maybe that's because of raising three children while working full-time. I think I got used to being tired all the time. If I'd waited until I was well-rested to read. I never would have read anything."

"The Club" of two life-long readers--mother Mary Anne and son Will Schwalbe--meets in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care centre. In the two years of life remaining to Mary Anne (after her persistent jaundice, weight loss and fatigue were finally diagnosed as symptoms of pancreatic cancer) she and her son, a professional editor and author, discover new writers and rediscover favourite stories, reading "promiscuously" books both great and small.

It would be enough if The End were a personal, and finely honed list of must-reads. It is this, but it is more. Schwalbe knows readers, their habits and idiosyncracies. After all, he's one of us. The serendipities and "stumbled upons" that happen in bookstores, the art of dodging from admitting we haven't read the book on everyone else's rave list, the books we read when we cannot sleep, the books we carry with us everywhere, the guilt and anxiety we feel for possibly suggesting the wrong book at the wrong time.

The End is a book of many meanings. As a mother's story, it can't help but contain great wisdom--the simple and profound kind that can only be accumulated by seven-plus decades of life, many of them as a wife, mother, advocate of education and champion of refugee causes. Even though she is well into her seventies and terminally ill, Mary Anne Schwalbe sustains these activities until near the end of her life. But it is only books and family that she is surrounded by at the very end.

"Reading isn't the opposite of doing," writes her son, who has only ever known is mother as a do-er of extraordinary proportions. "It is the opposite of dying."

Comments

Carrie Snyder said…

Sounds like a wonderful book! Thanks for the recommendation.

6:51 AM

Maycee Greene said…

I jotted down a lot of them while I was reading this. It was an interesting "take" on how to have a meaningful relationship with a loved one as they approach death.

Maycee Greene (Olympia Search Engine Optimization)

9:18 PM

"Indian Horse" by Richard Wagamese

“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,” Virgil said to me after one practice. “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.” Hockey is the saving grace of young Saul Indian Horse’s life. Lost to his family and orphaned in his grandmother’s arms, eight-year-old Saul is discovered at an icy railroad stop in northern Ontario and stolen away to spend the next six years at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. “St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world,” Saul remembers. He saw children die of abuse or suicide, with whatever they had to take themselves away from hell on earth: a pitchfork; rocks to weigh down a dress in water; rope to swing from the rafters of a barn. Anything, even death, was better than the despair of suffering the school’s daily humiliations. It is a hockey ice rink, built at St. Jerome’s during Saul’s second winter, that saves him. In the years that follow, the crack of light opened by hocke

An Unnatural Choice by Mary Hodder Ross "Adoption is two sides of a single coin. One side is the gift. The other is sacrifice." -- from An Unnatural Choice by Mary Hodder Ross What we believe we are meant to be is not always what we become. Some lives turn course on a dime into a defining story that begins with a single, heartrending decision. For Mary Hodder Ross that turn was an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 21. Born and raised in a small town in Newfoundland, Ross was "child number five" of six. She would be the first in her family to go to university. It was in her final semester before graduating as an English honours student from Memorial University that Ross learned she was pregnant. She crossed the stage at convocation without the sense of elation and possibility of those around her, but silently grateful for the gown that hid her growing secret. For the first 22 weeks of her pregnancy, Ross "...led a double-life, th

"The Game of Life" by Rosalys Buckles Thorndike Wilson

“The game of life has been enjoyable and rewarding, and I have competed to the best of my ability.”—from The Game of Life by Rosalys Buckles Thorndyke Wilson A long life, as Rosalys “Rosie” Buckles Thorndike Wilson looks back upon it, is like a basketball game. It’s played in four quarters (a sport she learned growing up in rural Indiana, where all you needed was a was a hoop on a wall and a ball that had some bounce) with a little time-out in between. Rosie’s first quarter started out on a small, 20-acre farm near Etna, Indiana. Baths were taken once-a-week in a galvanized tub in front of the kitchen wood stove. There were the requisite chores including chasing down dinner (which, on a fried chicken night, involved catching and decapitating a hen before dipping it quickly in boiling water and then plucking off all its feathers). There was a pony named “Beauty”; “Fluffy” the long-haired cat; “Spot” the rat terrier; “Fuzzy” the baby raccoon and “Duke” a horse retired by the U.S

Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

Search This Blog