Customer Reviews

Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics

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The other reviewers will speak better to the great qualities of this book, so I'll echo the best of them - a wonderful read that personalizes a national story with such heartbreaking and informative reporting that truly illuminates the theme that we are a country founded on questions in search of answers. A must read for any student of our political system as well as an enlightening introduction into the culture of hospice care. One of the most important memoirs published this year.

Eleanor Clift, known to many Americans by her presence and prescient offerings on "The McLaughlin Group", has written a dynamic book paralleling the lives and deaths of two people in the early spring of 2005...her husband, Tom Brazaitis, and Terri Schiavo, whose lingering life and death were watched by millions. In "Two Weeks of Life", Clift recounts the final days of both individuals...one who died a relatively private death...the other whose family endured a demise which was both horrifying and unnecessarily public.

Clift charts broad waters as she seeks and succeeds to give an overview of the times and how her own emotions were caught up with Tom. She tells of how hospice was looked upon in such craven ways as measured by the religious right's stepping over almost every conceivable boundary to "save Terri". Her accounts of Mary Labyak and the endurance tests she had to face as administrative head of Florida Suncoast hospice are chilling. Clift begins with an assertion that "this is not a political book, or at least it shouldn't have been", but knowing enough about the author one can only imagine it doesn't take her long to roll up her sleeves and opine...and she does so with gusto. On the Schiavo side we revisit the Congressional "call to action" with Governor Jeb Bush and President George Bush lamely trying to intervene...certainly a stain on the reputations of the entire Republican leadership. But she notes the Democrats were almost universally nowhere to be found, ending up with the whole operation as a bungled mess, at least politically. But Clift really shines as she relates her visits to Art Buchwald in hospice and the support she received from friends and colleagues on the McLaughlin program. Some of the funniest moments of the book occur while she is describing the back and forth food fight nature of the show. As the lone liberal and the only female, Clift's welcome voice is usually heard well above the din of the other guests.

"Two Weeks of Life" ends poignantly with columns written by Tom as he proceeds through his years of treatment. Providing some good medical information about his cancer, balanced by Tom's own wit, Clift gives a bittersweet feel to a man I'm sure we all would like to have known. I'm only sorry there was not a photograph or two of Tom included in the book so that the reader could have a face to put to his writings. I highly recommend this book and commend Eleanor Clift for showing the differences in how death can be experienced in both public and private settings.

You probably know Eleanor Clift, or at least know of her. On Sundays, she's the one being yelled at on The McLaughlin Group. Anyone who's seen that show knows she is a tough professional who stands her ground. This book proves it. Even in the hardest of times, Clift is a journalist to the core. She declares in the early pages that this is a love story, and indeed it is, as she records the love she shared with her husband, Tom Brazaitis, as together they faced his spreading cancer and eventual death. But it is more than a memoir.

At the same time she is recording in precise and difficult detail the last two weeks of Tom's life lived peacefully in the living room of their home with the help of hospice, she tells of another story of life and death taking place in Florida--that of Terri Schiavo. Terri Schiavo's story dominated the news as her husband and parents debated the decision of continuing to sustain Terri's life. The governor and courts of Florida became involved, and then the dispute was taken to congress and the president. While Clift was caring for Tom every night, she was involved as a journalist and commentator covering the Schiavo controversy. Her husband, also a journalist, had insisted early on that Clift continue her professional commitments. She did.

Now she has taken these two simultaneous events and combined them into an account that is both an intense personal memoir and a clear analysis of the hard decisions that face families when a loved one's life is ending. She gives her story clearly while she weaves in the Schiavo story in even-handed reporting. "I'm a journalist by training and instinct. That reporting is the vehicle for my journey to make sense of the physical, ethical and moral issues legitimately raised by both sides in the debate," Clift explains in the preface to the book.

This is a difficult topic, but one that most of us will have to face at some point. While the book is serious and straightforward, it is not difficult to read. In fact, it is a pleasure both to share the personal story and to benefit from Clift's clear writing. The inclusion at book's end of several columns written for the Cleveland Plain Dealer by Brazaitis across the course of his struggle makes the story even more tender and personal.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

A terrific book. Insightful commentary about the complexity of end of life issues brought to light through a poignant personal story juxtaposed against the highly publicized Terri Schiavo case that was the tipping point of the end of outright and shameless pandering to the Far Far Right...

I wanted very much to like this book, and I did--but only somewhat.

The Terri Schiavo material began to seem like filler to me and made me lose interest in the rest of the book. I followed the Schiavo case rather closely when it was in the news, and I didn't buy this book expecting more re-hash of it--but that's what I got.

Eleanor Clift does a great job of combining journalism and memoir. She objectively reports on the events surrounding the bitter dispute over Terry Schiavo's end of life, including the political maneuverings of Congress and the personal battle between Michael Schiavo and his wife's family. I followed that story closely as it was happening but learned new details reading Two Weeks of Life.

Ironically, as Ms. Clift is reporting on a very public and tumultuous end of life experience, she is very privately living her own with the impending death of her husband; a story she tells not as a journalist, but as a wife who is losing a beloved partner. The book presents the Schiavo story from the outside looking in and Clift's own story very much from the inside looking out. It illustrates the complexity of end of life decisions and our culture's difficulty in coming to any consensus on these issues. Ms. Clift also includes some interesting antecdotes about her experiences as a journalist, including an interesting discussion with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor about her position on Roe v Wade.

There is nothing superfluous in Clift's writing, which is very straightforward and clear. I recommend the book to anyone interested in reading an interesting story and, of course, to anyone who has a special interest in end of life issues.

Her husband was ill and dying around the same time as the Terry Schiavo media circus. As a grieving wife, she has an interesting perspecitive on the political and social implications.

I read excerpts of Eleanor Clift's "Two Weeks of Like" in Newsweek, where she's been a contributor for a number of years. Those selected well-written passages about a very sensitive event - the death from kidney cancer of her husband, Cleveland Plains Dealer Washington correspondent, Tom Brazaitis - made me seek out her book in hardcover. The work as a whole stands up to the strength of the Newsweek excerpts. The operative word in Clift's work is "juxtaposition" - the dignity with which Brazaitis spends his final days vs. how Terry Schiavo spends hers. Clift never comes out and editorializes about Schiavo's treatment, but by contrasting that experience vs. her huband's, she makes her point passively but no less passionately.

At the very least, anyone reading this book will surely react by wanting to have living wills and medical powers of attorney in proper legal order.

Eleanor Clift weaves personal revelations, interesting sidebars and her keen political insight from beginning to end in this engrossing memoir--it is a valuable tool for anyone dealing with the loss of a love.

Eleanor Clift has written a very thought-provoking book about her husband's death from cancer and its contrast with the very public controversy about Terri Schiavo's life and death at the same time. Questions about how we die and the right to choose that option in the face of terminal disease or being in a vegatative state are addressed. The courage shown by the terminally ill person and his or her spouse and loved ones is impressive. Eleanor Clift has always impressed me as a very caring and intelligent person and this book confirms that impression. A difficult subject treated very compassionately.