The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe's memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club (#593) was passed on to me by a friend who assured me I would love it.  In it, Mr. Schwalbe chronicles the time he spent with his mother, Mary Ann(e) Schwalbe, a truly remarkable woman, in her final months as she lives with pancreatic cancer.  Reading the same books with her to discuss while they wait through endless doctor's appointments and rounds of debilitating chemotherapy allow them to spend quality time together while exploring life issues and values.  He realizes later what a unique opportunity it became to ask her questions about her tireless work in education and connecting with refugees through her work on international committees.  Always undergirding her missions was a deep love of reading, which she passed along to her children.


Mr. Schwalbe centers his chapters in his memoir around the books they read at that point in time.  A number of the books which he listed in a separate appendix, I've also read and enjoyed, but I'm afraid many of them were either way too esoteric for me, or in the case of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, pretentious twaddle.  Both Schwalbes loved it.  There's no accounting for taste, I guess.


While the memoir was both interesting in many ways, and a son's touching tribute to his mother, I could not say that I loved this book.  Possibly because my own experiences with dying relatives have been so far removed from the privileged cocoon in which Mary Ann(e) spent her last few months.  People of my acquaintance are much more likely to fret over whether they will still be able to afford to keep a roof over their heads when the medical bills start pouring in, or if their surviving spouse will lose their home, than the fact that they won't be able to go to Geneva one more time, or spend the summer in the British Isles.  It must be nice.  And obviously the Cambridge where Will grew up in his bulbous shingled house was a world removed from the Cambridge of ordinary working folks like my parents.  I couldn't help but wonder if we were all invisible to families like the Schwalbes.  I guess we were.  The End of Your Life Book Club left me in the end feeling very unsettled.