The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) Read Online Free PDF

sympathize with his sense of letdown. Because, with the serendipitous exception of my son, I was not exactly a walking advertisement for personal fulfilment.

‘Goodbye, Katie,’ Charlie said. He opened the front door. I turned away from my brother and disappeared into the bathroom. When I came out two minutes later, I was relieved to see that he’d left.

Just as I was also relieved that the rest of the assembled mourners began to make their goodbyes. There were a couple of people from the building, and some old friends of Mom - increasingly frail women in their seventies, trying to make pleasant chit-chat, and appear reasonably spirited, and not think too much about the fact that, one by one, their contemporaries were vanishing.

By three, everyone had gone - except for Meg and Rozella, the large, cheerful, middle-aged Dominican woman I had hired, two years ago, to clean Mom’s apartment twice a week. She ended up being a full-time nurse after Mom checked herself out of Sloan-Kettering.

‘I’m not dying in some beige room with fluorescent lighting,’ she told me the morning her oncologist informed her the cancer was terminal.

I heard myself saying, ‘You’re not dying, Mom.’

She reached out from the bed and took my hand.

‘You can’t fight City Hall, dear.’

‘The doctor said it could be months …’

Her voice remained calm, strangely serene.

‘At the very outset. From where I’m sitting, I would say three weeks maximum. Which, quite frankly, is better than I expected …’

‘Must you always, always look on the bright side, Mom?’ Oh Christ, what am I saying here? I grasped her hand tighter. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just …’

She stared at me critically.

‘You’ve never really figured me out, have you?’ she said.

Before I had a chance to offer up some weak refutation, she reached out and hit the call button by her hospital bed.

‘I’m going to ask the nurse to get me dressed and help me pack up my things. So if you wouldn’t mind giving me fifteen minutes

‘I’ll get you dressed, Mom.’

‘No need, dear.’

‘But I want to.’

‘Go get yourself a cup of coffee, dear. The nurse will take care of everything.’

‘Why won’t you let me … ?’ I suddenly sounded like a whiny fourteen-year-old. My mom simply smiled, knowing she’d checkmated me.

‘You run along now, dear. But don’t be longer than fifteen minutes - because if I’m not gone by noon, they charge another full day for the room.’

‘So what?’ I felt like yelling. ‘Blue Cross is picking up the tab.’ But I knew what her response would be.

It’s still not fair to take advantage of a good, dependable company like Blue Cross.

And I would then wonder (for around the zillionth time) why I could never win an argument with her.

You’ve never really figured me out, have you?

Damn her for knowing me too well. As usual, she was right on the money. I never understood her. Never understood how she could be so equanimous in the face of so many disappointments, so many adversities. From the few hints that she had dropped (and from what Charlie told me when we used to talk), I sensed that her marriage hadn’t exactly been happy. Her husband had died young. He’d left her no money. Her only son had estranged himself from the family. And her only daughter was Ms Discontented who couldn’t understand why her mom refused to scream and shout about life’s many letdowns. Or why, now, at the end of her life, she was so damn accepting, and would think it bad manners to rage against the dying of the light. But that was always her fortitudinous style. She never showed her hand, never articulated the inherent sadness which so clearly lurked behind her stoical veneer.

But she was certainly right about the timetable of her illness. She didn’t last months. She lasted less than two weeks. I hired Rozella on a twenty-four-hour care basis - and felt guilty about not being with Mom full time. But I was under