Longtime readers may have noticed that I reread this book outside of my prescribed ‘rereading month’ (more commonly known as December). What gives, you may have thought? Well, as I like to say around these parts, whenever unusual things happen there is always a reason… and… The Real Reason.
The Real Reason I reread Being Mortal was because I wanted to check if something I’d believed for about the last three years or so was true. My belief was this: I believed that I’d read Being Mortal in April 2015 and learned that my mom wasn’t just sick but also dying. This was contrary to what I was being told at the time by pretty much everybody else, notably among them the author’s own colleagues (since my mom was hospitalized at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the same hospital where Atul Gawande works whenever he isn’t writing bestsellers).
I’d formed this belief based on an anecdote from the book. As I recalled, this anecdote described a woman with a very similar disease progression to my mom. It seemed to predict the future – once a person reached a certain point in the illness, all the doctors could do would be to oscillate between disease treatment and symptom management until they slowly ran out of ways to do the former.
So, I reread this book thinking about that memory and wondering how accurately I’d read the story the first time. As it turned out, surprise of surprises… my memory wasn’t very good about it at all! It wasn’t like I realized I completely invented this story – I was able to find the anecdote in question and it did cover some of the general ideas as I’d recalled them. But in terms of the specific anecdote I recalled having any predictive value for me in April 2015, well, I can’t really say after rereading that I knew what I was thinking back then.
