A book club of two

The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe

I really had no intention of reading another book about a mother's illness and death, so soon after Madeleine L'Engle's The Summer of the Great-Grandmother.  But when Anbolyn mentioned this book, the title intrigued me, and after reading the summary on our libraries' website I added myself to the reserve list, expecting a lengthy wait.  Instead, it arrived almost immediately (the mystery of library lists).  When I had trouble settling on another book after finishing Seward, I picked this one up and was immediately immersed.

The book opens with Will Schwalbe sitting with his mother Mary Anne Schwalbe at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan, where she was being treated for pancreatic cancer.  As they were waiting to see her doctor, and for a round of chemotherapy, Will asked his mother, "What are you reading?"  This was a question they'd been asking each other for most of his life.  She was reading Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner, a book he had owned, unread, for years.  This time when he picked it up, it clicked with him, and they spent her next appointment talking about it.  One of the characters in the novel (which I haven't read) is dying of cancer. 

The novel gave us a way to discuss some of the things she was facing and some of things I was facing . . . Books had always been a way for my mother and me to introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy, and they had also always given us something to talk about when we were stressed and anxious.  But it was with Crossing to Safety that we both began to realize that our discussions were more than casual - that we had created, without knowing it, a very unusual book club, one with only two members.

Books have almost always been a great comfort to me, either as a distraction in the times of stress and anxiety; or as a way of connecting my situation with others, giving it context, trying to understand my experience through someone else's, even if that someone is fictional.  But that has been a private and individual response.  I am intrigued by the idea that a shared love of books could help a child and a parent through illness and death, that their discussions could "introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy" - helping them face their fears and doubts.

Will had another goal for the book club:  "I wanted to learn more about my mother's life and the choices she'd made, so I often steered the conversation there."  Like Madeleine L'Engle, his book is in part a tribute to his mother and the extraordinary life she lived, as wife and mother, as a student and then an educator, as an aid worker in some of the world's most troubled areas.  She was the founding director of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and also founded the British branch of the International Rescue Committee (the parent organization of the Women's Commission).  When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, she was raising funds for a national library in Afghanistan.  She believed in the power of books to change people, to change the world.  Will's pride is her is clear, and one of the most touching moments in the book is when he tells her that. "I know that Mom knows I love her, but I don't know if she knows I'm proud of her."

His narrative weaves together his mother's life, the books that they read and discuss, and the progression of her disease and the side effects from chemotherapy.  Will's father, his partner David, and his siblings and their families are also part of his story, though he notes, "If it's mostly about Mom and me, and less about my father and siblings, that's only because I believe that their stories are theirs to tell, if and when they choose."  I enjoyed listening in on their book discussions, though I haven't read most of those they chose.  Mary Anne was particularly drawn to books like Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns that spoke to her experience working with women and children, or with refugees.  These included some very dark and difficult stories, which might not be my choice if I were in her situation (more Heyer and Wodehouse).  The story of her illness and treatment felt  familiar from my mother and friends who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.  That aspect also reminded me of a book I read last year, again about a mother's battle with cancer, The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke.

I found this book moving, in Mary Ann Schwalbe's life and in her courage in facing death, in her close-knit family's care and concern, and in the love between mother and son.

A summer of loss

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, Madeleine L'Engle

This is the second of four "Crosswicks Journals" that Madeleine L'Engle published between 1972 and 1989.  I knew L'Engle only as the author of the classic young adult novels A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, and I discovered the first in this series because it had been improperly shelved in the children's section at Half Price Books.  "Crosswicks" is the 200-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut where L'Engle lived for many years with her husband Hugh Franklin and their three children.  When they later moved back to New York City, they spent their summers at Crosswicks with their extended family, including L'Engle's mother, also named Madeleine L'Engle.

Four generations gathered at Crosswicks in the summer of 1971.  When the elder Madeleine arrived, it was immediately clear that she was not well and was getting worse.  Now 90, she had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, which was causing increasing weakness and senility.  Her condition often left her confused, unable to recognize family members, and even hostile, stranded as she believed she was among strangers.  Her daughter Madeleine arranged for her to be cared for in their home, while struggling to accept the reality of her mother's condition.

I know that this is a classic symptom of atherosclerosis, this turning against the person you love most, and this knowledge is secure above my eyebrows, but very shaky below.  There is something atavistic in us which resents, rejects, this reversal of roles. I want my mother to be my mother. And she is not. Not any more. Not ever again.

But if her condition was irreversible, it was not terminal, and she could continue in this state for some time, a prospect that appalled her daughter.

Will I ever be like that, a travesty of a person? It was the last thing she would have wanted, to live in this unliving, unloving manner.  I look up at the sky and shout at the stars, "Take her, God! Take her!

This is not a journal in the sense of a daily record of her mother's condition and the challenges of being a caregiver, though these are part of L'Engle's story.  It is more a meditation on facing death, one's own and that of loved ones.  As L'Engle notes, we face many losses in life.  She herself had experienced the deaths of grandparents, aunts and uncles, as well as her father many years before.  With her mother, it was a different kind of loss, not the immediate finality of death, but the erosion of her mother's being, her identity, and of their relationship: "I want my mother to be my mother."

One of the ways that L'Engle tried to cope with this loss was by trying to understand, to capture the reality of her mother, even as she was slipping away.  Her narrative becomes part biography and autobiography, in sections titled "The Mother I knew" and "The Mother I Did Not Know."  As she acknowledged,

The mother of my childhood and adolescence and very young womanhood existed for me solely as mother, and I suppose it is inescapable that for a long time we know our parents only as parents, that their separate identity as full persons in their own right unfolds only gradually, if at all.

She considers her parents' marriage, complicated by her father's service in the First World War, where he was gassed, from which he never fully recovered.  Even in her childhood, she was aware of strains in their family, despite the care her parents took to shield her.  She looks back at her mother's childhood, in a small town in Florida, tracing her ancestry back to the earliest days of European settlement.  L'Engle clearly took great pride in her family heritage, but I found myself confused as she moved back and forth between generations and branches (a family tree would have helped).  Over the years her family owned plantations and the slaves that worked them ("servants" in the familiar evasive language).  L'Engle insists that they were benevolent masters and later good neighbors to the freed people.  At the same time she details the suffering of her family in the Civil War and Reconstruction period, with much of their property lost in the conflicts, without acknowledging what that property was, or the suffering endured by African Americans both in slavery and in freedom during these years.  But then she was writing in the early 1970s; perhaps a later generation would tell a different story.

Finally, this book is also a meditation on faith.  As a Christian, a believer, L'Engle struggles to reconcile what her faith teaches her about loss, death, resurrection, with the reality of what is happening to her mother, and what will happen to her in turn.  She struggles to find God in her mother's suffering, in her own pain; to find meaning; to affirm her belief in "a loving God who will not abandon or forget the smallest atom of his creation."

This was not an easy book to read, but a rewarding one in the end.  L'Engle writes movingly of parents and children, of her own family.  I enjoyed her account of her childhood and adolescence, following her birth in 1918 in New York City, including her years in a Swiss boarding school and later at Smith College (she herself died in 2007).  Her mother is a fascinating figure, who led an adventurous life travelling around the world with her journalist husband, and faced life as a widow with dignity and courage, and found joy in it.  Perhaps her daughter idealizes her small-town Southern childhood, but it is a lovely warm account.

This book also resonated deeply with me because I lost my own mother last year, after many years of debilitating illness.  "I do not know how to say goodbye. All I can say, within my heart, is, 'I love you, Mother.'"

A mother lost

Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin

In the United States, we sometimes use "lost" as an indirect euphemism for death.  We say, "He lost his wife last year."  There are also frequent stories in the media of someone lost, an individual (often with dementia) who has wandered away from home, or who has run away.  Sometimes the person is quickly found safe and brought home again.  In other cases, there is no happy ending.  In Please Look After Mom, a family faces the heart-breaking possibility that their mother So-nyo, who is missing, may be dead, and may never be found.  She was traveling with their father from their home in a small rural village to Seoul.  Usually one of their four adult children would meet their elderly parents at the train station, but this time their father said he could negotiate the subway on his own.  On their way to the subway cars, the husband and wife became separated.  In the crowd, he did not even realize for some time that she wasn't on the train.  When he went back to the station to look for her, she had disappeared. 

The book opens with the single line, "It's been one week since Mom went missing."  As the children search, frantically and fruitlessly, the story moves back and forth between the present day and the past.  They grew up in the small village, where their mother supported the family by farming and also by turning her hand to any kind of craft that could save money or make money, like brewing malt for sale to a local brewery.  Herself uneducated and illiterate, she was determined to send her children, including her daughters, to school.  Most of this work, and that of caring for the children, fell on her alone.  Her husband was often absent, simply walking out of the house and disappearing for long periods.  It is never clear what exactly he did during these absences, which usually ended with him quietly returning home and picking up his place in the family's life.

As the children search for their mother, they remember, and their memories spark questions, shake assumptions, change their understanding of their mother and of themselves.  The narration for most of the book is in the second person ("The family is gathered at your eldest brother Hyong-chol's house . . . You decide to make flyers . . . ").  It moves between the children and the parents, in five sections that each focuses on a different character (though we hear almost nothing from the second son, not even his name).  The story is linear, as it follows the search, but within that frame-work it moves back and forth in time, in people's memories.  With the shifts in narrative, we as readers learn things about the different characters, secrets never revealed, which change how we understand the family and especially the mother, So-nyo.  I found my picture of her constantly changing as I learned more about her, even in the final chapters.

There is so much going on in this deep, absorbing story.  This is the first novel set in South Korea that I have read, and I was fascinated with the setting, with all the details of daily life, both on the farm and in the city. The parents were born in the 1930s, so their lives span the terrifying years of the Korean War, as well as the changes in South Korea after the war, including urbanization and the decline of rural life, as people moved from the farms to jobs in the cities.  The father's restless wanderings are a reaction to the stresses of the war, during which he lost both his parents and two brothers, and of the unsettled peace (as well as the challenges of raising four children).  One by one, as the children finished their education in the village schools, they followed their eldest brother to Seoul.  With jobs and families, their lives were centered in the city, and they returned home less and less often.  The younger daughter even moved with her husband to the United States, where they lived for several years before returning home to Seoul.

This story, though, also speaks to universal themes of parents and children: of the shifts in relationship as children become adults and parents themselves; of parents who feel they are losing children to independence and their own lives; of children struggling for that independence yet still reverting to childhood at times;  and of the moment when children (sometimes very belatedly and with a sense of shock) realize their parents are individuals with an identity beyond "mother" or "father," with their own stories, their own lives.

This is also a story of profound loss and grief.  We are never told directly what has happened to So-nyo, and though we can guess, the family may never know.  As hard as the finality of death is, I cannot imagine how one copes with the grief of uncertainty, the fading of hope.  The heart-breaking last line, a prayer, gives the book its title: "Please, please look after Mom."  I think that might be what many of us feel in the face of death; we crave the certainty that our lost loved one is safe.

Kyung-Sook Shin won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, the first woman to do so.  I didn't read any of the other other nominees (though Fay over at Read, Ramble posted about the books and the award itself).  I think this is an amazing book, and I am glad to see its excellence recognized in the award, and in reviews both on blogs and in print media.

A memoir of loss

The Long Goodbye, Meghan O'Rourke

I got this book from the library after reading a quote in a review: "After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally."  That one statement struck me as so absolutely true that I felt impelled to read this book. We have recently suffered a loss in my family, and I am still trying to learn to believe this.

The Long Goodbye is a memoir of the illness and death of Meghan O'Rourke's mother, Barbara Kelly O'Rourke.  The book opens with a brief prologue, a memory of summer family vacations. The first sentence of the first chapter then comes as a shock: "My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three p.m. on Christmas Day of 2008."  From there O'Rourke moves back and forth in time, weaving together different strands of narrative: her parents' marriage and her own childhood; her mother's diagnosis of stage four cancer, the agonizing and ultimately futile treatments she endured; and the aftermath of her mother's death and her own attempts to live with that reality.

It is a truism that grief is universal, but each of us experiences it in unique way.  At the same time there are commonalities.  As other writers like Joan Didion and Kathleen Ashenburg have noted, as a society we have lost many of the rituals that helped people in past generations; we don't know how to mourn.  Yet public grief has become unseemly, except at the deaths of celebrities.  In our self-help society, mourners are expected to "get better," to move on, lest they make others uncomfortable.  O'Rourke's parents were both atheists, and she considers the role of faith in loss, coming to some stirrings of belief herself.  From what I have seen, faith doesn't always provide answers or even consolation, but the rituals of faith, especially liturgical burial rites, do offer some comfort, even if it's just the comfort of having something to do, to follow.

O'Rourke is a poet, and her words sing in sorrow.

"The night is very long, and my mother is lost in it . . . The bond between mother and child is so unlike any other that it is categorically irreplaceable . . . with my mother's death, the person who brought me into the world left it, a portal closing behind her . . . " 

Apparently it is common after a loss for mourners to be given books on grief, and apparently these aren't always welcome or helpful.  This one might be both.