The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes by Anna McPartlin
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a gorgeously-layered prolonged gaze at a life lived beautifully and the unfairness of its end.
a novel that takes place in a hospice where a young mother spends her last days saying farewell to her family, most notably her twelve-year-old daughter, might sound unremittingly bleak, until you take into account that this is an irish novelist, and if any culture has a tradition of confronting death with a defiant laugh and the strength of family rallying together, well…
this is daring and brave and bittersweet and blistering and nostalgic and all five stages of grieving all at one time. it’s a whirlwind of memories and goodbyes and waiting. it’s wanting to suck the juice from every remaining moment of a loved one’s life but also wanting their suffering to end. it’s the secret shame of wanting it to all be over so the living can return to their own lives, put on hold to see their sister, daughter, aunt, friend, through to the end. it’s such an honest look at the realities of watching while someone slowly slips away. sometimes it’s boring watching someone just sleep in a hospital bed for hours, as horribly selfish as that sounds. but this book is bold enough not to sugarcoat or ennoble the experience of watching someone linger on, in pain and with no hope of recovery. the very natural emotions of grief – all the anger and frustration and helplessness, all the tender memories and regrets and the painfully stubborn hope that refuses to be extinguished by unyielding facts.
it’s tough and delicate in tone as it switches between the exhausted clinging of the terminal patient and the agonizing of the family waiting for the end, laughter and tears and memories spent with rabbit in her final days. rabbit’s diagnosis seems particularly cruel for a woman who lived as she did – capable and strong from her earliest days, being the rock through the terrible illness of her one great love. rabbit is a woman who abandoned catholicism as a child on the grounds that the old-testament god was “mean,” and bought a buddha statue as a teenager because she preferred to look at a fat god laughing than a skinny one dying. to see the life of someone so in love with life cut short is incredibly powerful.
but it’s funny, i swear. funny and bighearted.
a lot of the humor comes from molly, the matriarchal center of the family, loved and feared by practically the whole neighborhood. she’s a no-nonsense bluster of cursewords and unintentional foot-in-mouth, but she’s also a tornado of love and care and strength. yet even she is subject to grief, and unextinguishable hope, as she grasps at last-minute straws, both medical and spiritual, refusing to give up hope for her daughter.
the story is told from the entire family’s perspectives, and swings from the past to the present to the concerns of the future. it’s early promise cut short and the near-stardom of a rock band, and celebrating all of life, even its end.
not at all my usual fare, but i was completely caught up in it. beautiful heartwaves.
tl;dr: the commitments with cancer.
