In the spring of 2007, Mom was given the opportunity to join an International Rescue Committee delegation to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and everything seemed to be coming together nicely: in Peshawar and Kabul, she’d be able to spend a lot more time with Nancy to firm up a plan for raising money for the libraries. While in many families it would be big news if one member was to up and visit one of the most dangerous places on earth—a place where Mom had previously been shot at (though she always said they were shooting at the tires, not at her), where she had met with the military leader Ahmed Shah Massoud (who was later assassinated by two suicide bombers), where the Taliban still controlled much of the country, and where more than two hundred members of the U.S. and Coalition forces would die before the year was out—for our family it was business as usual. I can’t recall if I even remembered Mom was going there, she traveled so much.
SO WE DIDN’T expect anything would be different this time she went traveling; nor did we suspect anything would be different when she returned sick. She was no sicker than she usually was after a visit to a war-torn land. She came back from most of her work trips—Liberia, Sudan, East Timor, Gaza, Côte d’Ivoire, Laos, to name a few—with some kind of ailment: a cough, exhaustion, headaches, a fever. But she would simply soldier on with her busy life until her various ailments faded away.
There had certainly been occasions when Mom came back from a trip sick and stayed sick for a long while. There was a cough she acquired in Bosnia that lasted about two years, becoming so much a part of her that we noticed it only when it suddenly disappeared. And there were various skin ailments: spots, bumps, and rashes. But in all those cases, she didn’t get sicker. She came home sick and stayed sick until she got well or until everyone, including her, forgot that she’d ever been better.
We always insisted that Mom see doctors—and she did: her GP, and various tropical disease experts, and occasionally other specialists. But except for a frightening bout with breast cancer that was detected early enough that surgery sufficed and no chemotherapy was required, and a gallbladder that needed to be removed, she’d never had anything else seriously wrong with her. The assumption was always that there was nothing the matter with Mom that couldn’t be cured if only she would slow down.
Which she wouldn’t.
We all also believed that if Mom would just once take a full course of antibiotics, she would rid herself forever of all her travel-related ailments. I don’t know if it was thrift or stubbornness or distrust of medicines, but after consuming half the prescription, she would save the rest for later, which was maddening. Even reminding her that she might be creating a superbug didn’t have much effect.
The summer of 2007, however, Mom stayed sick. Fairly quickly, every doctor and specialist confirmed what she had: hepatitis. She was turning yellow; the whites of her eyes were the color of organic egg yolks—not the pale yellow of supermarket eggs, but blood-tinged gold. She was losing weight and had no appetite. And it was fairly obvious where she’d contracted the hepatitis, since she’d just come back from Afghanistan. Something she ate, perhaps. Or some shower water getting in her mouth. But the doctors at first couldn’t figure out what type of hepatitis it was. Not A, not B, not C—not even D. They thought that it might, perhaps, be the very rare hepatitis E. Still, even the fact that no one was completely sure what strain Mom had wasn’t much of a worry. If we couldn’t understand Afghanistan’s complicated political and religious situation, did we really expect to have identified every weird virus and disease you could pick up there?
Her doctors were not incautious—early on, they did tests to rule out other things and felt pretty confident that they had ruled them out. They provided some recommendations: she would need to rest and also not drink any alcohol (for her not a big deal, although she did like a glass of wine with dinner, and champagne at celebrations). That was all.
The summer progressed, however, with Mom getting progressively sicker. She was tired. And she was aggravated to be tired, and to have hepatitis, and not to be feeling herself. She didn’t complain, but to those closest to her, she occasionally noted it. Now that I think back, every mention she made of her hepatitis sounds ominous. She would occasionally say to my father or to one of us something like “I don’t know why they can’t figure out what’s wrong with me.” Or “I rest and rest and never feel rested.” Nevertheless, she pushed herself to do just about everything she wanted to do.
Did she ever really rest? It was difficult to say. For her, a “lazy” day was one devoted to catching up on email or “attacking” her desk (always the word she used, as though it were a paper-spewing monster that needed to be fought lest it take over and destroy everything in its path). Only when she was reading was she truly still.
Watching Mom struggle to keep up with the demands of her life caused tension to build in the rest of the family. We couldn’t get mad at her for not feeling well and for refusing to relax, so we got far more annoyed at one another than we usually did for all sorts of little crimes: being early, being late, forgetting a birthday, making a sarcastic comment, buying the wrong flavor of ice cream. We tried to keep Mom from overhearing these squabbles but didn’t always succeed. She was usually able to solve them, dismiss them, or referee them—which made the combatants feel guilty for having quarreled at all.
This summer was a busy one, and neither Mom nor I was able to read the way we liked to during summers—that is, most of the day, day after day, indoors and outside, at home or at the vacation houses of friends—so we tended toward short books. I read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, which even a slow reader can start and finish in an afternoon. Mom had it on her list of books to read and asked me what I thought.
We’d both read several novels by Ian McEwan over the years. McEwan’s earlier works feature a catalog of cruelties, including sadism and torture. Mom had spent so much time in war zones, she said, that she was drawn to books that dealt with dark themes, as they helped her understand the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. I’m drawn to books with dark themes mostly because I always feel better about my life in comparison. In his more recent novels, however, McEwan had become less extreme, if not exactly cheery. On Chesil Beach was his latest and had just been published.
In some ways, On Chesil Beach is an odd book to discuss with your seventy-three-year-old mother—given that it involves a just-married couple in 1962 about to have sex for the first time, and describes their disastrously clumsy and messy attempt in vivid detail. That, I didn’t mention to her. Instead I talked about the book’s fascinating and melancholy coda, which explains what will happen to each of the two main characters. On Chesil Beach had moved me so much that I didn’t want to pick up a new book for a while.
“I wonder if things could have turned out differently,” I added, after I told her about the couple’s fate. The great thing about knowing that my mother always read the ends of books first was that I never had to worry about spoiling them.
“I don’t know,” Mom answered. “Maybe not. But maybe the characters think that things could have turned out differently. Maybe that’s why you found it so sad.”
We continued talking about the book for a little while, with me still neglecting to mention the pivotal sex scene—not because Mom was prudish but because I have the classic child’s horror of having such subjects discussed in the presence of my parents. (I remember vividly the trauma of seeing Peter Shaffer’s play Equus with Mom and Dad when I was thirteen. At the point when the boy and girl take off all their clothes and attempt to have sex, I’d wanted to become a pattern on the seat’s upholstery.)
Eventually our discussion on that July day returned from my thoughts on the McEwan book to family logistics—who would be where when. Then, at some point, as in most conversations that summer, Mom said that she still couldn’t get rid of the hepatitis, that she still wasn’t herself, that she didn’t have much of an appetite, and that she felt not great. But she was sure, sure, that she would soon feel better, regain her
appetite, get stronger. It was only a matter of time. Meanwhile, there was just too much to do—for family, friends, and the libraries to be built in Afghanistan. All needed her attention, and she loved giving it. If only she felt a bit better.
THAT AUGUST THE whole family (my brother and his wife; my sister and her partner; me and mine; all five grandchildren) and several friends traveled to Maine to celebrate Dad’s eightieth birthday. Mom had organized just about everything and was at almost every event: group breakfasts, a boat trip, and a visit to the Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor.
Dad was then, and still is, hardy. He has a full head of hair. Once portly, he’s now slimmer than many of his friends. He may puff a little when climbing stairs, and he’s by no means what people call a sportsman, but he likes to garden and go on long walks and be outside. He’s not fussy—he prefers quirky old restaurants that have seen better days to fancy ones—but he does like a level of comfort. He also likes baroque music and action movies, roadside diners, and having time and leisure to read books on the British Raj. He’s completely uninterested in schools and real estate, which were two of Mom’s favorite topics, and while he’s capable of chatting with great charm about topics that amuse him, he also loves to challenge others when he’s decided they’re spouting nonsense. He’s happiest when it’s a little chilly and a bit misty. And he also likes lobsters and a good clambake, as do we all. So Maine was the perfect place to celebrate his birthday.
But in the midst of all the shore dinners and boat rides and enjoying Maine sunsets with a drink firmly in hand, all the adults, especially Dad, noticed how much Mom was struggling, a fact she was determined no one should acknowledge until the weekend was over.
She looked increasingly drawn and weary. Her skin wasn’t more yellow, but she was thinner and her face was more creased; her cheeks sagged, making her perpetual smile seem slightly pensive. Still, all the lines seemed to disappear when the grandchildren marched in front of her on one mission or another. During that trip, Mom turned to me one evening and said that it was hard to imagine herself or ourselves any luckier.
What had gone so terribly awry for the people in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, one character thought, was that they’d never had love and patience at the same time. We had both.
The last morning of our stay, which was in a sprawling, shingle-style, classic Maine hotel, I came down to find Mom on the porch with the four younger grandchildren around her. She was reading them a story. It was a crisp Maine summer morning. I pulled out my iPhone and hastily snapped a few pictures. I remember realizing that Nico, the oldest grandchild, wasn’t in the picture. I mean, why would he be? At sixteen, he wouldn’t have been listening to his grandmother reading a picture book.
I ran to his room and told him I needed him—so he unplugged himself, put down his own book, and followed.
We walked together to the porch, and then Nico joined the crew so I could get a picture of Mom with all five of her grandchildren. I’m not sure why I felt compelled at that moment to do it. I never take photographs. Maybe I sensed that something was about to happen beyond the control of love, patience, or any of us, and this was my last chance to fix time.
THE FINAL WEEKEND of the summer, mid-September, my partner, David, and I spent with a friend who always rented a particular house on the beach in Quogue, about two hours from Manhattan, on Long Island.
Mom loved when I told her about visiting this friend, because the house belonged to John O’Hara’s daughter, Wylie, and to O’Hara himself before that. O’Hara was one of Mom’s favorite authors. The house was a ramshackle Cape on a rapidly crumbling bluff overlooking the beach and ocean, and it had the perfect porch for lying around and reading. Not surprisingly, the bookshelves were filled with John O’Hara books. On this visit, I’d decided to cheat on the book I’d brought and read O’Hara instead.
First, though, I’d figured I better find out a bit about O’Hara. I learned from books in the house that O’Hara was born in 1905 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. His father was a distinguished Irish doctor, and the family was able to send him to Yale. But his father died when he was at college, and his mother couldn’t afford to continue to pay his tuition, so that was the end of Yale for him. The experience of having to drop out gave O’Hara a lifelong obsession with money, class, and social exclusion. He first drew notice in 1928, during Mom’s parents’ era, writing stories on these themes for The New Yorker, and then, in 1934, at age twenty-nine, he wrote Appointment in Samarra, which made him famous. Mom said that O’Hara was, at first, someone she was told she should read and then soon became someone whose books she eagerly awaited.
When I got back to the city after my Quogue weekend, my father was in the hospital with septic bursitis in his elbow, having let it swell to the size of a small grapefruit before Mom made him seek emergency-room treatment. I called Mom to get the update. He hated being in the hospital, but he was doing well.
“So I finally read Appointment in Samarra,” I told her. “I’d always thought that book had something to do with Iraq.”
Appointment in Samarra is not set in Samarra or anywhere else in the Middle East but in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s. The novel tells the story of a young married car dealer named Julian English, who thinks he has all the right breeding and connections and who impulsively throws a drink in the face of a wealthier and more powerful man whom he loathes for no good reason. Three days later, and after two additional impulsive acts—including making a pass at the girlfriend of a gangster—Julian has lost literally everything.
“I can’t believe you hadn’t read it. And it does apply to Iraq, even if that’s not at all what it’s about. It’s a book about setting things in motion and then being too proud and stubborn to apologize and to change course. It’s about thinking that being raised a certain way gives you the right to behave badly. It seems Bush was fated to get us into a war there no matter what.” Mom was not a fan of our then-president, and she was horrified that he’d used al Qaeda and 9/11 as a pretext for invading Baghdad. Dad sometimes played devil’s advocate to Mom’s most liberal views, but on this subject he felt similarly, and they’d both taken recently to sharing books dissecting American foreign policy.
As we talked more about Appointment in Samarra, we soon found ourselves discussing the book’s epigraph, which is, in fact, a speech from a play by W. Somerset Maugham, a writer on whose stories we would both later jointly binge.
Maugham’s parable is a retelling of a classic Iraqi tale. The speaker is Death:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
Later, we would have more time and cause to talk about fate and the role it did or didn’t play in the events of our lives—particularly in the events that lay ahead. But during that phone call in September, my mother and I soon moved on to other topics. When it sounded like the conversation was drawing to a close, Mom had one more thing she wanted to mention.
“I just wanted to let you know that your sister is insisting I see another doctor and go in for more tests.” The new doctor was going to do another scan and try to determine why she couldn’t get rid of the hepatitis.
“That sounds like a good idea, Mom.”
Then we were back to me. “And are you going to get some rest?” she asked.
“There’s so much to do before I leave,” I hedged. “I don’t know how I’m going to get it all done.” At the time, I was editor in chief of a book publishing house, and was headed, as I was every year, to Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is held the first week in October.
“You can only do what you can, and what doesn’t get done, just doesn’t get done.” Mom was forever giving me advice that she would never herself take.
“Mom, I promise to take it easier if you do—we’ll make a deal. But it sounds like no matter what, it’s going to be a very challenging couple of days for you, especially when you’re still not feeling well.”
Every day, Mom was at the hospital for a few hours with Dad. Friends she adored were in town from London, so she was spending time with them. She was also planning to drive hours out of town with them to visit another friend, who had a brain tumor and had just been told he had anywhere from three months to two years to live. Then, at the end of the week, she had her appointment with the new doctor.