A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

It is December, and Eggers’s mother is dying on the couch in their home in Lake Forest, Illinois. She has stomach cancer and can no longer walk, so she spends her time watching TV and spitting green fluid into a small “plastic receptacle,” which Eggers and his sister Beth take turns emptying. The green fluid smells foul, but Eggers never comments on it. Six months ago, doctors removed his mother’s stomach, though by then there “wasn’t a lot left to removed.” Eggers notes that he would list what they had already taken out, but he doesn’t know the medical terms.

Eggers describes the progression of his mother’s illness, including the brief period after she did chemotherapy when it seemed like everything might be all right. Unfortunately, her health quickly deteriorated after this brief reprieve, and now Eggers pictures black coils of cancer cells teeming in her stomach like some “unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever.” As Eggers and his mother watch a show on TV about bodybuilders competing in athletic competitions against amateur athletes, she gets a nosebleed. Because she can’t pinch her nose tightly enough, Eggers reaches over and tries to stop the bleeding with his own hand, but it doesn’t work.

A month earlier, Beth woke up early and went downstairs, where she found the front door open. It was late autumn in Illinois, and cold air was coming through the open doorframe. As she got closer, she saw the shape of her father outside. He was, for some reason, kneeling at the end of the driveway.

Eggers takes a moment to describe their house, explaining that his family’s taste is “inconsistent.” In the family room, for instance, there is a recessed part of the chimney. One day, Eggers writes, his father decided to fill this space with a fish tank. Not caring to measure the area, he miraculously bought a tank that was a perfect fit. “Hey hey!” he said as he slid it in, a phrase he liked to use after accomplishing small, strange feats. “Loser,” his family would often respond, and he’d say, “Aw, screw you,” and go make himself a large Bloody Mary.

Eggers is home from college for winter break. His older brother, Bill, has just returned to D.C., where he works for something Eggers says has to do with “eastern European economics, privatization, conversion.” Beth, for her part, has been home all year because she deferred her first year of law school. Since she rarely gets the opportunity to go out, she likes it when Eggers is home. Now, while holding his mother’s nose, Eggers gazes at the fishless fish tank, which is still full of gauzy water. “Would you check it?” his mother says, talking about her nose. When he lets go to look up her nostril, nothing happens for a moment, but then the blood comes. This is dangerous, because her white blood cell count is so low that her blood won’t clot.

When his mother’s oncologist told them that “any bleeding could be the end,” Eggers wasn’t worried. “There seemed to be precious few opportunities to draw blood,” he writes, since she spent all her time on the couch. “I’ll keep sharp objects out of proximity,” he joked, but the doctor didn’t laugh. Wondering if he heard him, Eggers contemplated adding, “No more knife fights. No more knife throwing.” However, he refrained from saying this, since this doctor doesn’t often joke. “It is our job to joke with the doctors and nurses,” he says. “It is our job to listen to the doctors, and after listening to the doctors, Beth usually asks the doctors specific questions,” he notes. He points out that he “know[s]” he “should joke in the face of adversity,” since there’s “always humor,” but recently he’s been unable to find anything funny about his mother’s situation.

As Eggers holds his mother’s nose again, Toph comes upstairs from the basement, where he has been playing video games. “I can’t get the Sega to work,” he says. Asking him if it’s turned on, Eggers tells him to turn it off and on again, and Toph retreats once more into the basement. Eggers then shifts gears again, narrating the moment that Beth saw their father kneeling outside. As she watched him, she noticed how slight he looked in his work suit. “He had lost so much weight,” Eggers writes. “A car went by, a gray blur. She waited for him to get up.”

It has been ten minutes, and Egger’s mother’s nose has not stopped bleeding. She had another nosebleed two weeks ago, and when Beth was unable to stop the flow, she took her to the emergency room, where the doctors kept her for two days. Even though her oncologist insisted that she stay longer, she demanded to be taken home because she is “terrified” of hospitals and fed up of having to spend time in them. Now that she’s home again, she has determined to never go back, and has even made Beth and Eggers promise they won’t force her to return.

“We are both distantly worried about the bleeding nose, my mother and I, but are for the time being working under the assumption that the nose will stop bleeding,” Eggers writes. As he continues to hold her nose while she watches TV and spits green fluid into the small plastic receptacle, he encourages her to “talk funny, the way people talk when their nose is being held,” but she refuses, telling him to “cut it out.” Changing the subject, she asks him how school is going, and he lies, saying things are fine even though he has actually been dropping classes. “How’s Kirsten?” she asks, referring to his girlfriend. “She’s good,” he says, and even though he’s engaged in conversation, he feels a creeping sense of dread, sensing that “it’s coming.” “We know it is coming,” he writes, “but are not sure when—weeks? Months?”

Half an hour later, Eggers stops holding his mother’s nose, and for a moment it seems the bleeding has stopped, but then it flows again with a vengeance. He grasps her nose, squeezing so hard he hurts her. Meanwhile, Toph comes upstairs and announces that he’s hungry, but Eggers tells him he can’t feed him at the moment. “Have something from the fridge,” he says. When Toph asks what they have, Eggers says, “Why don’t you look? You’re seven, you’re perfectly capable of looking.” After a moment of going back and forth like this, their mother interjects, urging Toph to come to her, but Toph goes downstairs instead, waiting until Eggers orders a pizza. “He’s scared of me,” their mother says.

Eggers asks his mother what she wants to do about her nose, which won’t stop bleeding. “I think we should do something,” he says, but she says she just wants to wait. Eventually, she lets him call the nurse, who tells them to apply ice. While doing this, Eggers decides to lie lengthwise on the top edge of the couch—above his mother—so that he can hold the pack to her nose while still seeing the TV. Soon, the plastic receptacle fills to the brim, and Eggers notices that the liquid has blood and bile and blots of blackness in it. At this point, Beth comes home and asks what’s going on, and they tell her about the nosebleed. “Shit,” she says. She and Eggers talk about the situation for a moment, and when they turn back to their mother, she says, “I’m not going back in.”

Six months before this episode with the bloody nose, Eggers’s father called him and Beth into the living room. He sat there smoking as they came into the room, and before they had a chance to get settled in, he said, “Your mother’s going to die.” In retrospect, Eggers calls his father “a man of minor miracles” and thinks that his courage in this moment was “pretty incredible.”

Beth takes Eggers’s place holding the ice to their mother’s nose, and Eggers goes downstairs to tell Toph that he’ll order pizza soon. When he comes back upstairs, he takes the plastic receptacle from his mother and goes to empty it, but the fluid spills down the leg of his pants, and he finds himself wondering if it will burn through the denim. Beth meets him in the kitchen, where they whisper about what they’re going to do. It has been an hour since their mother’s nose started bleeding, and there are no signs indicating that it’ll stop anytime soon. “It could be it,” they say to each other. “She wants it to be it.” They then debate whether or not this is true, deciding that—like them—she’s probably “scared” and not “ready” for the end.

When Beth goes back into the living room, Eggers contemplates how long it would take for his mother to bleed to death. He wonders if there are enough towels in the house to clean up the blood she’ll spill if her nose bleeds for an entire day. He thinks about calling the emergency room, posing as a high school student doing a report on “slow blood leakage,” but immediately disregards this idea. He then realizes that if his mother is about to die, he and Beth will have to call people before she does. They’ll have to call Bill and their mother’s former volleyball teammates and her coworkers. How, he wonders, will they have enough time to do this? He will have to do it as a conference call, he decides, but then realizes he doesn’t have the necessary equipment, so considers visiting Kmart to get the supplies.

Eggers decides against calling multiple people at once. Instead, he and his family can simply spend this time together, can “hang out, just sit there.” It’ll be nice, he thinks, then cuts himself off, reasoning, “Jesus, it’s not going to be nice, not with the blood everywhere.” He hears Beth’s voice from the living room saying, “Mom, we should go in.” Joining the conversation, he too urges their mother to visit the hospital, and she eventually says, “Look at you two, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” When they look at her in confusion, she adds, “You want to go out tonight, that’s what it is.” They refute this, but she says, “It’s New Year’s Eve. You two have plans!” After more arguing, they finally convince her to let them take her to the emergency room.

Eggers once again describes Beth’s experience of watching their father as he knelt in the driveway. Recently, he had been falling in the kitchen and shower. When Beth realizes what she’s looking at, she dashes out the door and runs to him.

Back in the family room, Eggers picks up his mother and carries her to the car, promising not to let her head hit the doorframe—a promise he fails to keep. Once he loads her into the backseat, Beth comes into the garage with Toph, who sits in the station wagon’s rear seat. When they’re all in the car, Beth turns around, looks at her family, and says, “Road trip!”

Eggers describes his father’s funeral service, which took place in the third week of November. He remembers feeling “embarrassed,” thinking that it was “all so gaudy, so gruesome,” especially since the family was smiling so much and shaking hands and inviting people to watch them “in the middle of [their] disintegration.” He recalls listening to the minister, who hadn’t known his father because his father was a staunch atheist. Then Bill gave a eulogy, and though he was good in front of crowds, he was perhaps too good, too lighthearted. Afterwards, people crowded into their house and played Trivial Pursuit in the family room, though this was no fun without any alcohol (Eggers tried to hint to his friends that they should go get a case of beer, but none of them did).

At the house after the funeral, Eggers and Beth talked to their father’s friend, a lawyer who carpooled with him every day. “He was the best driver I’ve ever seen,” he says. “So smooth, so in control. He was incredible. He would see three, four moves ahead.” Beth and Eggers savor these anecdotes because they’ve “never heard anything about [their] father” and feel like they don’t know anything about him beyond what he was like at home. “I did not know that the last time I saw my father would be the last time I would see my father,” Eggers says, explaining that he was put in intensive care shortly after his diagnosis, and when Eggers himself went to visit, he found him smoking a cigarette right there in the hospital, looking casual and content.

Eggers’s mother spends the night in the emergency room, followed by a day in intensive care. She’s then put in a spacious room with large windows, which Beth calls the “death room” because there’s enough space for visitors. As their mother sleeps, Beth and Eggers lie on an adjacent hospital bed with Toph and talk about how disconcerting it is to hear the pauses in their mother’s breathing. They also talk about how strange it is that this room doesn’t have a TV.

After the guests left Eggers’s house in the aftermath of his father’s funeral, he and Kirsten snuck off to his parents’ bathroom to have sex. The house was full of people, so this was the only place they where could find any privacy. “This is weird,” Kirsten said as Eggers spread out a blanket. He and Kirsten met in college and dated for several months before things became serious. At first, neither of them thought the relationship would last very long, but then Eggers told her that his mother had cancer, and she revealed to him that her mother had a brain tumor. “From then on,” he writes, “we were more serious.”

While sitting with Eggers and Toph in the hospital, Beth remembers with a start that the next day is their mother’s birthday. She reminds Eggers, and they decide to go to the gift shop to buy flowers and a card.

Telling the story of his mother’s final days, Eggers switches to the future tense, saying, “We’ll get her out in a few days.” He explains that he and Beth will take her home and install her in a hospital bed in the living room. They’ll also have a full-time nurse come to take care of her. Just before it’s too late, they will pay for her sister—their aunt—to fly out, and her appearance will make their mother smile and sit up for the first time in days. There will be “an endless stream of visitors” and a priest who delivers mass in the living room while Eggers cooks a frozen pizza in the kitchen and listens. He and Beth will stay up late with their mother, doing anything they can to make her comfortable, but she’ll eventually begin speaking “incomprehensibly,” filled with a strange paranoia.

“There will be morphine,” Eggers writes. Soon enough, the doses won’t be enough to soothe his mother, so he and Beth will order more and they will obtain permission to choose the dosage amount. They’ll give her a steady flow of the drug “every time she moans,” and this will stop the moaning. “We will leave while they take her away and when we come back the bed will be gone, too,” Eggers writes. Not long after she’s gone, he will take Toph to watch the Chicago Bulls practice, and they will sign his baseball cards. Eggers and Beth will randomly take him out of school sometimes just to make him happy. Beth will take care of all the legal worries, but everyone knows that Eggers will be the one to take Toph.

Still using the future tense, Eggers explains that he and Beth will sell the family house a week after their mother dies. Toph will finish third grade while he himself drops classes. Eggers won’t earn his college diploma, but he will walk at graduation, and then he, Beth, and Toph will move to Berkeley, California, “where Beth will start law school.” For now, though, Eggers sits by his mother in the hospital and watches her sleep. He stands to whisper “Happy birthday” into her ear, and when she doesn’t stir, he sits in a chair and looks at Toph, who wakes up under his gaze. “He gets up and comes to me as I am sitting in the chair,” he writes, “and I take his hand and we go through the window and fly up and over the quickly sketched trees and then to California.”