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A review by robloz55
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
4.0
I read this book for the 2023 Buzzwords Challenge. The words for January 2023 was LIFE and DEATH.
This is the memoir of the life and death of one woman in New York City who was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer in 2007 and who died in Sept 2009, 2 years later. In between the diagnosis and her passing, she and her publisher son (the author of this memoir) read and discussed quite a number of books.
I liked this book a lot. The only reason I did not love this book is because I am not very religious, and Mary Ann Schwalbe (the subject of this memoir) was a devout christian.
This memoir has rather a lot of similarities to my family and my life. Which is why it rates 4 stars. It would have been 5 stars had there been a lot less of the religion mentioned.
Will Schwalbe (the author) drifted away from the religion that he was raised with. I did the same. I left the church before I was 20 years old.
Mary Ann Schwalbe, the mother, was the total opposite of my mother. About the only thing they had in common was their devotion to their christian religion and their church.
Mary Ann loved reading books. My mother does not.
Mary Ann was actively involved with a number of charities, My mother is not.
Mary Ann went to college and was taught that she would have a career as well as a husband and children. Which is exactly what she did. My mother only went to nursing school, and promptly stopped working as a nurse as soon as she was married.
My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer around the time of his 60th birthday. He had surgery and an ostomy bag but was eventually unable to continue working, and was forced to retire at age 62. He was later also diagnosed with Prostate cancer (the slow kind)
He spent the next 17 years of his life, reading a ton of books, and walking a lot, and volunteering with the local Citizens Advice Bureau (the place where people could go to find out how to solve their problems).
From 2010 onwards, my family developed a regular Skype chat that would be sacrosanct and happened every week on Saturday mornings in New Zealand (where my parents live) and Friday afternoons in Canada, where I live. My family all lived for these chats. Dad and I would spend a few minutes of the chat discussing what books we were reading and thus were recommending to the other person.
In May of 2016, my father would often fall asleep during our chats. In early June he was moved to the Hospital for testing, but a week later he was moved to hospice care. He died at the end of June 2016 at the age of 79. He and my mother had been married for 57 years.
6 years later these chats are still a regular part of our lives. But now its just my mother, my sister and me.
In many ways this memoir gave me an insight into the last few years of my fathers life - even if he had a different kind of cancer.
This is the memoir of the life and death of one woman in New York City who was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer in 2007 and who died in Sept 2009, 2 years later. In between the diagnosis and her passing, she and her publisher son (the author of this memoir) read and discussed quite a number of books.
I liked this book a lot. The only reason I did not love this book is because I am not very religious, and Mary Ann Schwalbe (the subject of this memoir) was a devout christian.
This memoir has rather a lot of similarities to my family and my life. Which is why it rates 4 stars. It would have been 5 stars had there been a lot less of the religion mentioned.
Will Schwalbe (the author) drifted away from the religion that he was raised with. I did the same. I left the church before I was 20 years old.
Mary Ann Schwalbe, the mother, was the total opposite of my mother. About the only thing they had in common was their devotion to their christian religion and their church.
Mary Ann loved reading books. My mother does not.
Mary Ann was actively involved with a number of charities, My mother is not.
Mary Ann went to college and was taught that she would have a career as well as a husband and children. Which is exactly what she did. My mother only went to nursing school, and promptly stopped working as a nurse as soon as she was married.
My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer around the time of his 60th birthday. He had surgery and an ostomy bag but was eventually unable to continue working, and was forced to retire at age 62. He was later also diagnosed with Prostate cancer (the slow kind)
He spent the next 17 years of his life, reading a ton of books, and walking a lot, and volunteering with the local Citizens Advice Bureau (the place where people could go to find out how to solve their problems).
From 2010 onwards, my family developed a regular Skype chat that would be sacrosanct and happened every week on Saturday mornings in New Zealand (where my parents live) and Friday afternoons in Canada, where I live. My family all lived for these chats. Dad and I would spend a few minutes of the chat discussing what books we were reading and thus were recommending to the other person.
In May of 2016, my father would often fall asleep during our chats. In early June he was moved to the Hospital for testing, but a week later he was moved to hospice care. He died at the end of June 2016 at the age of 79. He and my mother had been married for 57 years.
6 years later these chats are still a regular part of our lives. But now its just my mother, my sister and me.
In many ways this memoir gave me an insight into the last few years of my fathers life - even if he had a different kind of cancer.