Customer Reviews

The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

If you've lost a parent, then you're likely to better empathize with author Robin Romm in her "memoir of three weeks." The short sorrowful time was the last of her mother's life, spanning portions of October and November 2004. Robin describes the woman she remembers from her pre-debilitated days as, (p 144) "the one who dispenses legal advice, knows what's showing at the MOMA, cooks cornflake chicken while simultaneously doing laundry and balancing her checkbook, potty-trains the dog, corrects your grammar, counsels sparring couples, and remembers exactly where she puts everything." At nineteen, during her freshman year of college, she learned of her 46 year old mother's grim diagnosis: stage iv breast cancer. One doctor gave her a year, the other, ten. Suffering through a series of treatments, she survived nine years with the insidious disease. Her daughter's story is one of regret (time not spent with Mom); resentment towards her doctor-father, of whom she writes, (p 147) "for the nine years my mother was ill, he checked out;" disdain for the horrid hospice nurse who had (p 3) "no interest in my mothers' life" and seemed to want to dose Jackie Romm with drugs to hasten her death, "She's building a boat to sail my mother out," and a bit of conflict with her mother's long-time lawyer friends, (p 148) "there's competitiveness brewing in the kitchen-who can make Mom lucid, who can spend the most quality time with Mom." Family, friends, and church members rally around the dying woman, trying as best they can to provide comfort. Robin deals in her own way, trying to prolong her mother's life, quarreling with hospice workers and caregivers, and hanging out with friends, amidst a sometimes chaotic household filled with persons and pets.

The only real fault I find with The Mercy Papers is that it is not divided into chapters. Part One, 172 continuous pages, ends with Jackie Romm's death. And it seems disrespectful to stop reading at any point during that section. Part Two, the funeral, fills only twenty pages, followed by the five-page Afterword. Some might take issue with the fact that few would want to be "portrayed" in such a state: sick, withered, weary, and not much longer for this world. Romm, an only child and writer by trade, gets that. Of it she writes, (p 209) "...she would have wanted her journey to be something others could use." It was useful to me. From reading it (often overwhelmed with tears), I realized that my father's sudden and unexpected death (of chf at 62), could have been worse. And I don't begrudge those insensitives who tried to comfort me in the aftermath with, "At least he didn't suffer," quite as much as I used to. The Mercy Papers is lovely, lurid, and laudable, especially to those who have lost a parent. Similarly sad: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (especially the beginning) by Dave Eggers, and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

This is Romm's chronicle of her mother's death from metastatic breast cancer at age 56, nine years after the diagnosis. The author is only about 28 when this occurs, and her writing manages to be both unflinching in its portrayal of a harsh reality and egocentric in its depiction. I was 31 and the principal caregiver when my own mother died at home of lung cancer and emphysema, in about the same three-week time frame that this book covers, so I can relate to much of what she said--especially the sense that others are going about the mundane business of everyday life while family members know they are standing on the brink of a precipice. Their lives center on the minutia of physical care where their best efforts are only palliative; they know that within a brief span of time everything will be irrevocably changed, and perhaps not for the better. It is a dire feeling, and one that disconnects them from others not in the same situation.

That said, I could not fully embrace Romm's account. The book was too much about her and not enough about her mother. I would have loved to hear more about the once-vibrant Jackie Romm, feisty civil rights attorney and accomplished woman in her own personal life. But the author is very angry with her mother for dying, and is waging a battle to cheat death: "I don't want my mother to die. She's downstairs now, her breathing labored, her face creased and ashen. She's swollen everywhere and on her sternum you can actually see the skin puffed out where the tumors have grown, like a basketball rising from her chest . . . but no matter haw many times someone tells me a story about `releasing the dying,' I'm not going to say this. I won't be okay." (Wisely, her mother tells her that she doesn't need her permission to die.)

But in fighting the impossible fight, Romm is angry at the world. She despises the hospice nurse who supplies pain medication and soothing music, and puts a stop to the morphine in order to have her mother "more present" with her until mom begins screaming in agony. She berates her physician father as having "checked out" during their long and lonely vigil, when it is more likely that he is just trying to deal with the impending loss of his wife in his own quiet way. (He certainly never stops his care on her behalf.) She faults her boyfriend in another state for not taking a leave from work to be at her side for however much time it takes, even though he visits often and is unfailingly supportive to her. She seems jealous that her mother's two former law partners seem to have quality time with her mother and with each other that she is not a part of. And she throws a real tantrum when the new social worker comes to visit, attacking her with profanity for her intrusion into the family as a part of hospice. What Romm never seems to get is that all of these people are trying to help, but they are all approaching this difficult task in their own way--not hers. It is both an honor and a burden to tend to a dying person, but ultimately each one of us must find our own approach. I hope that in time this author discovers the solace she thinks will elude her, and I have no doubt that she will helped along by her cattle dog, Mercy, for whom this book is named.

In The Mercy Papers, Robin Romm presents a warts-and-all peek into her and her family's lives during what was arguably one of the most emotionally wrenching events for her family - the prolonged dying and death of Ms. Romm's mother. Surviving for nine years after her diagnosis, Romm's mother Jackie appears to have spent much of that time suffering varying levels of pain and debilitation. While earlier moments during those nine years are referenced, much of the memoir seats itself in the last few weeks, a useful writing tactic on Romm's part, as it helps the reader feel the real claustrophobia that Romm felt herself during that time. And not only claustrophobia, but ennui, which creep in daily, ultimately making participation in any "normal" activities seem like an obscene act. Romm gets across very effectively that horrifying sense of walking in circles, emotionally.

In the writing of memoirs such as this one, it can be hard to resist the urge to sugar-coat the events, or place the participants in the best possible light. One has to admire Ms. Romm for her willingness to show every family member - and especially herself - experiencing all the conflicting emotions and thoughts that *do* happen - given her characterization of her own mother as a forthright and frank individual, her approach seems to be a fitting service to her mother, as well as to her readers.

This mercifully brief book is one long, anguished scream. I felt there was not enough reflection on the days before the author's mother was ill -- all of the author's rage could have used some balance. Even at the end of the book, the author remains angry, and announces that she plans to stay that way. For her there is no closure; she doesn't want closure. A door has been closed that she did not want closed.

I found the unstinting anger off-putting. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from this book, or for whom this book is meant. I have enough experience with death to know that the death of a loved one never leaves you; that the deceased is with you --but not with you -- every day. I know how frustrating and impossible that is. But I can't see the point in vowing to remain angry for the rest of your life.

The author reveals that she wrote this book only a few years after her mother's death. I respectfully suggest that it was too soon to publish a book about her mother's illness and death. The book could have been more layered, meaningful, and helpful -- to readers and to the author -- if the author had sat with these feelings for several more years, to see how -- if at all -- they develop.

I picked up Robin Romm's memoir with curiosity and put it down a few days later, fully read, with nothing less than awe and admiration. This is not just a memoir of Romm's difficult last weeks with her mother, who was dying from cancer. That alone would have made it a beautiful and moving read, in its detailed and honest approach. But Romm is a much accomplished writer in her own right, and has created here, perhaps inadvertently, a literary tour de force. She does what all writers dream to do: reveal the utter beauty and ugliness of the human condition in a wondrous celebration of love, life, and words. Every line is a gem.

--Karen Macklin (journalist, author, and editorial director of Zest Books)

The bond between a mother and a daughter is not easily broken -- not at 40, not at 50, and certainly not at 19, when Robin Romm's mother is diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. During the next 10 years, Romm loses her mother by degrees, and, in this memoir, focuses on the last three weeks of her mother's life.

This isn't a pretty, sentimental book; some may take offense in the author's focus on herself as her mother gets ready to "set sail". I am not one of them. To me, the book is painfully, grippingly honest: it shows the strong and messy feelings that occur when death reaches in and yanks the one person who is one of the centerpieces of our lives -- our mothers.

Romm runs the gamut of all emotions: extreme anger at those who appear to be hastening her mother toward the end, fear of being left alone, vulnerability of watching others, such as her boyfriend, go on with day-to-day lives as she is immersed in the death watch. There is even humor; for instance, Romm hears that when the fingers turn blue, there is only four days left to live. Naturally, she's horrified when she sees that her mother's fingertips are blue, only to find out it's because she was eating blueberries.

There is fury here, and awe, and a sense of retreating back to childhood in emotions and thought processes. This is definitely an unflinching look at death; while others prefer to "close the wound, hurry it shut", the author correctedly senses that this loss will be always life-altering. For those who are navigating loss, at whatever age, I also suggest the excellent "An Uncertain Inheritance", a composite of stories by well-known authors about their experiences with various types of loss. The Mercy Papers deserves kudos for its unfailing honesty.

This book traces the three final, intense weeks of the Robin Romm's mother's terminal breast cancer. At 211 pages (which includes 12 blank pages that somewhat melodramatically follow the mother's actual death), it is a short book. But the experience that it describes seems larger than the book's size would predict. I think that is because Romm's mother suffered from her illness for nine years, and Romm's own sense of herself as she developed from teenager to woman (she is 19 at the time she learns of her mother's illness and nearing 30 at her death) was therefore formed (or perhaps deformed) by her awareness of that illness and the pressure it put on their relationship. An only child, she clearly had a close and complicated bond with both her parents (the acknowledgments movingly allude to her debt to her father), which gives the loss of her mother a particular devastating poignance.

Romm writes powerfully about her tremendous sadness and the way that the circumstances of her mother's final days -- including all the medical paraphernalia, pills, masks, syringes, oxygen tubes, well-meaning but flat-footed nurses, and so forth -- degrade the quality of their time together at the end. Many readers have appreciated her honesty, which is indeed impressive. This is certainly a gripping book to read, and I'm sure that any readers going through a similar ordeal will take comfort from Romm's acknowledgment that sometimes there is little that feels redemptive about the death of a loved one -- and that our own feelings in such circumstances can be more selfish and angry than we would like them to be.

Still, Romm's tendency to view her mother's life and death through the prism of self, while all-too-human, ultimately becomes irritating to the point of shocking. Part of the reason it's hard to fathom that this book covers only three weeks is the number of time-outs that Romm needs to give herself: First, before she arrives and against her father's wishes, she has to acquire a dog which discombobulates a house already overrun with pets (too appropriately the book is name after the dog); the dog needs to be walked; she signs the dog up for obedience class; she dresses the dog up as a brussels sprout for Halloween; her boyfriend comes for a visit, and they spend the night at a hotel; her best friend also arrives to support her; other friends worry that she's too cooped up in the death house, so they all go to a movie; someone named Joan takes her to lunch. As she dresses for the funeral, we discover retrospectively that, during those 3 weeks, she squeezed in the time to buy herself a new silk skirt and turtleneck "because [she] had to get out of the house . . . and it seemed nice to have an outfit hanging there." Still, she refuses to stay up nights with her mother, leaving that task to her father and her mother's law partners, because she "knows her limits."

Even at the funeral she is still (mis)behaving like an adolescent, ripping up the astroturf where chairs for the mourners have been set up because it interferes with her artist's sensibility of what her mother's funeral should be like. No wonder the funeral home employees smirk at her. Every memory of her mother turns into a memory of herself. Again, no wonder the real adults in the house have to "try hard not to judge" her. As Romm dimly realizes, they all love her and are cutting her slack because her mother is dying -- but they are in pain too, which Romm seems not to notice. In the midst of one particularly acute medical crisis, even her mother dubs her "Ms. Melodrama."

Readers have no such obligation not to judge. She's put this private memoir out there in the public, itself a startling act. There is much to be learned here, but Romm's narcissistic response to her mother's illness should not be taken as a model for how to get through such a devastating experience. One can feel for her without embracing her perspective.

A description of this book--a daughter's last three weeks with a mother who has been dying of cancer for years--makes it sound grim, but as sad as it is (and it's terribly sad) it is equally beautiful, even darkly funny at times, with the complexities and contradictions of life, death being part of life, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise. Romm is one of those writers who makes it look deceptively easy, because she is uncommonly honest and able to zoom in on the perfect moments to dramatize her story. This is one of the most raw and accurate accounts of grief that I have ever read. You will remember this mother and daughter long after you put the memoir down.

The only thing that kept me reading to the end was the hope that at some point the author would have an epiphany and become even slightly less self-centered. It never happens. I understand that grief is personal and unique to each individual, but the constant "me me me" emphasis of this book wears you down. I agree completely with the other 1-star reviews, particularly the one that said this book should have stayed a journal and never been published. I can't remember when I've read a book with a less likable, less sympathetic narrator. I am very sorry her mother died and died in such an awful way, but I was glad to say goodbye to Robin.

Honest and raw. This book is an honest and uncompromising recount of the three weeks leading up to the death of Robin Romm's mother (from cancer). Romm details the daily occurrences: the pain medications, making sure her mother's oxygen mask was on correctly, the food that people kept bringing to their house, how the people in the house behaved, the people from the hospice trying to up her mother's pain medications, etc. And she also describes her own feelings and thoughts: the feelings of abandonment, the anger at the idea of death, the pleading and bartering with God, the feeling of loss, the unwillingness to let go. The details are symbolic and the prose poetic and it is all drenched in sorrow and anger. She resents when she is asked to tell her mother it is ok to let go when she know she is not ready and will never be. She drags through the day trying to get through, willing the day to last and pass and leave her mother alive. The book is incredibly moving and challenges us to relive those last three weeks with the author.

As someone that has lost a parent, this book is validating and cathartic. You read the words and identify with the feelings of anger and loss, the idea of death and the empty vacuum it leaves. To say that this book moved me would be an understatement. Rather, I became involved in the prose and events of the book. I felt deep understating and empathy for the author and what her family went through.

The book very well written and deeply affecting. The author involves the reader as the emotions surge through and the rawness and ugliness of death come to life, exposed and quiet but never swift.