Book Review - The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

Books read for my book club are decided on each June at our final meeting. The list comes home and gets lost in my computer files until, each month I drag it out and get the next book on my list. This book review is the final read for this season’s book club. Chosen last June, I had put it at the very back of my mind until time to read it. I didn’t finish it in time for book club, and so this review is late, but is was my very good fortune to have read it.

To put it mildly, I enjoyed this book. This biography and memoir is of a son’s experience as his mother is diagnosed, the many treatments and her death. At the books beginning, he tells his readers that the stories of his father, his sister and his brother are their’s to tell. And in retrospect, with the emotion involved in this experience, it would have been too big to even try to tell. Humour, kindness, joy and life are all in this biographical memoir.

Mary Anne Schwalbe dies of pancreatic cancer at age 75. Her second son, Will Schwalbe, reads through the last two years of her life with her.  Their book club was borne of their love of reading and of books, and the many long times in waiting rooms, and hospitals.  Should anyone think that that is all that happened in that two years, they would be wrong.  Mary Anne Schwalbe was a humanitarian, an organizer, a mother, a friend and this lovely memoir tells of an all around good person. Will Schwalbe tells not just of the discussion of the books that they read, but how his mother kept up her activities until she was truly unable to, despite the waiting rooms and hospitals. Before her activities with the outside world, Mary Anne Schwalbe, devoted time and attention to her family - her grandchildren, her husband, her children and their spouses, families that she had helped and, without fail, reading. She wrote letters, emails and made phone calls.

In all that time she and her son read books, recommended books to each other, developed their mother/son relationship and enjoyed life as it unravelled. Mary Anne Schwalbe often said that she was lucky. She always seemed to find balance in her life. Having worked in Darfur and in Afghanistan with families and children, she knew that she was lucky. Throughout the book, it was evident that they were a moneyed family, and knew many people, but she was very humbled by what she had ~ she knew that she was lucky.

“Still, one of the things I learned from Mom is this: 

Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; 

it’s the opposite of dyting.”

~ Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club