Reading until the end

We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one

Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

Everyone's mother dies, so why does the death of Will Schwalbe's mother rate a book? The answer is not just that Mary Anne Schwalbe was a remarkable woman, but that mother and son spent so much time over the last months of her life in doctors' waiting rooms, in cancer centers, in hospitals and in hospice care talking about books. Will Schwalbe tells about the experience — and his mother — in The End of Your Life Book Club (2012).

Theirs had always been a reading family, but like most people, each read their own books according to their own taste. After the cancer diagnosis, Will and his mother decide to read the same books and then talk about them during those hours spent together. The books they talked about so often opened doors to personal topics that otherwise might never have been spoken about.

Each chapter of the book is named for one of the books they discussed during that period. Talking about The Painted Veil, they branch off into a discussion of courage. Murder in the Cathedral leads naturally into frank talk about facing death head-on. Everyone talks about the importance of first impressions, but the novel Brooklyn mentions the importance of last impressions, a good topic for a dying woman and her son to talk about.

Readers will come to love Mary Anne Schwalbe as her son did. She's a woman of remarkable faith, remarkable concern for others and remarkable ambition to make a difference in the world, not just in the United States but as far away as Afghanistan, where she visited many times. Even close to death, she worked for others as long as her strength held out. Yet she always found time to read, and she always understood the importance of talking to someone about what she read.