Lives in Transition

This is a novel about Claire and Eliot, married for decades, when Claire enters the last few weeks or months of her life, stopping cancer treatment after 8 years. At the start of the novel,  Claire drops her bombshell – she wants her 2 women friends, Holly and Michelle, to nurse her in her last weeks, not Eliot who has looked after her all along. She only wants her women friends around her, and Eliot has to move out of their home.

Eliot and Claire have a strong marriage, 2 children who are very loving too, Abby and Josh. Claire’s decision comes as a bombshell to them all. They want to protect their father, while also wanting to let their mother have her dying wish. Although shocked by Claire’s decision – which she takes pains to tell him it is not because she doesn’t love him – Eliot’s first thought is to protect his children and Claire, so he announces he wants to do whatever Claire wants, and will move out of their home and into Holly’s home. The next day, Josh calls his father “amenable”, but not in a complimentary way; Josh says,

“you’re like this benign blob walking around” (p45)

Eliot is very hurt, and reflects on that later:

“Eliot was pierced by the notion that for his entire married life he had pretended to agree when actually what did, what he always did, was concede” (p50).

However, this amenable, benign blob may be neither as amenable or benign or blob-like as Josh imagines. On the first night he goes to stay at Holly house, he finds that

Holly had left food in the refrigerator for him, which pissed him off. He dumped a bowl of broccoli and rice salad into the garbage, followed by a platter of chicken. She seemed to have missed the fact that he did all the meal prep in the home these days, that he didn’t need feeding” (p62-63).

It is understandable Eliot, under the circumstances, reads the food Holly provides as suggesting he cannot fend for himself, but even so, it seems a petulant over-reaction to dump good food into garbage, which indicates a depth of rage and even violence of emotion Eliot may not have wanted to express or acknowledge. 

He both loves Claire and yet is often unable to articulate his anger towards her. But flashes of anger do happen:

“Resentment roiled through him. Even now, even on the brink of death, even after signalling she was in some essential way finished with him, she had to correct him. All their lives she’d done this” (p74)

The story is told through Eliot, so we mostly see his feelings, his reactions, his inner workings. Claire however, is the puzzle. Why does she keep hurting Eliot by pushing hm away and yet insisting she loves him? She sends mixed messages which are extremely hurtful and damaging, and yet she is supposed to be so astute, so emotionally intelligent, so caring. A lot of this does not add up. One spends the book wondering what sort of character Claire really is.

The writing is quite good. Packer depicts quite well the emotional tangles of looking after a close family member with terminal cancer, and even considers the nuances of being a ‘caretaker’ versus a ‘caregiver’. The managing of emotions of others is also critical – in this case, Eliot and Claire also  both try to soften the blows for their grown up children, Abby and Josh. But Packer’s characters are weak – the two women friends Claire wants looking after her – we never get to hear whether they want to give up their lives to move in with her and look after her – are Holly and Michelle, and although they are supposed to be such strong, independent women, they turn out to be cardboard characters, almost sycophants which is terribly disappointing and non-credible. Likewise, Abby and Josh are just props too. None of the characters, including the protagonists, are well drawn actually.

But it is still a good read, for all that. We never do get to the bottom of what Claire actually wants and why, but that perhaps is also true to life, that people may act strangely, especially near the end of their lives, and may not have rationale reasons for what they want and do. The poignancy of course is watching the impact on Eliot, who has to oscillate between not knowing if he should treat Claire’s unfair/unkind dying wishes with all the due respect and consideration of a full functioning adult in her right mind, or regard them as those of someone no longer of sound mind, and spare himself some of the pain, but potentially, do her a great disservice. Packer does demonstrate this pain of not knowing – and indeed, some of these issues have no correct answers – on those closest to the dying person.

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