Her Decision

Addicted as I am to scanning death notices, I was only a few pages into Ten Clear Days when I put the book down to search the internet for information on Marianne Judith Manoville Beck, the octogenarian whose life and death are at the heart of her grandson Eric Beck Rubin’s second novel. The notice was brief, saying only that she had died in 2018 at Sunnybrook Hospital, in Toronto, surrounded by family. Then it named her husband of sixty-five years, H. Thomas Beck, who had predeceased her in 2016; it listed their descendants; and it noted their favoured charities: the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. There was no mention of the Holocaust or of MAID, two defining events both in her life and in this evocative and compelling story.

Beck’s debut novel, School of Velocity, which was included in the Guardian’s 2016 roundup of best books, was about friendship and rivalry. This equally spare and dramatic work is about loss and grief, about a pain that may recede but never disappears, and, ultimately, about memory and love. The title refers to the reflection period of ten clear days between the time a patient has applied and been approved for medical assistance in dying and its provision. (The legislation has since been modified to allow a waiver of final consent if the approved patient is in danger of losing capacity to confirm assent immediately before MAID is provided.)

The plot revolves around Mary Beck, Rubin’s eighty-two-year-old grandmother (or eighty-three, depending on who is counting). M.B. is a widow who has suffered a heart attack and a stroke and has been rushed to hospital, where she has had a stent inserted in one of her four blocked arteries. She awakes from the operation outraged that Jackie, the younger of her two adult daughters, has authorized the emergency procedure, despite a do-not-resuscitate order and the designation of her elder daughter, Claire, as her power of attorney for health. Therein lies a family conflict, exacerbated by the fact that Claire and her husband are on a plane headed from Toronto to London Heathrow.

The sisters are opposites. Claire, who seems to be more like her dead father than like her mother, knows and approves of M.B.’s wishes, while Jackie is fiery and needy and has a long history of fraught scenes with M.B. Jackie, who can’t bear the idea that her mother might want to die, is not ready to let go, a not infrequent state of mind for grieving relatives with unresolved issues.

Claire flies back from England, waving her mother’s DNR, confronts her sister, and supports her mother’s refusal to have more surgery and her decision to apply for MAID. “Being a survivor is not a lifetime sentence. Life is not supposed to be a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit,” Claire admonishes her sister. “If she loved us, she wouldn’t leave us,” Jackie retorts. “All of us who come here every day. It’s not right.” By “all of us,” she means the extended family who have assembled in M.B.’s hospital room in a vigil for the woman they all love.

Ten Clear Days is set in 2018, two years after the enactment of Bill C‑14, the federal legislation in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to decriminalize assisted dying. The publisher describes it as a novel, but really it’s a fictionalized memoir, as Rubin himself has written on Substack, linking his book to a tradition that dates back at least to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, from 1722: “As I was writing Ten Clear Days, I regarded it as the fulfillment of a promise I made to my grandmother, the story’s protagonist, and a private conversation between her and me.” That’s it. No further details. So I drew my own conclusion.

I think the promise was to explain why somebody such as M.B., who withstood the Holocaust in Hungary, would ask for an assisted death. Wouldn’t she want to live as long as possible? Not necessarily. Having survived the Nazis’ horrific extermination campaign against the Jews, she might well want to exert some authority over the timing and means of her own death. After all, control is one of the reasons people choose MAID.

Rubin, a cultural historian at the University of Waterloo, has invented an awkward character called the Observational Record Author, or Au., who takes notes and reports to the Office of the Chief Medical Officer. Ostensibly, Au. has been appointed to observe and gather information because M.B. has refused treatment, but it’s hard to credit that such a person would be on the hospital payroll, especially since M.B. has a valid DNR. His real job, or so it seems to me, is to move the plot forward and to introduce testimony about M.B.’s life, both as a child in Hungary and as an adult in Canada, as reported by old friends and household staff. Rubin himself appears as a character named Eric, who has written a dissertation about how the Holocaust is represented in contemporary literature and has interviewed his grandmother about her early life.

And what a life it has been in all its horror, pathos, and love.

Born in 1935 to affluent parents, M.B. has a privileged childhood in Újpest, then a suburb of Budapest. Artistic, she exults in the paintings on her parents’ walls, the creative delights in taking pictures with her Brownie camera, and loving relationships with two caregivers who abandon the family as the Second World War engulfs Europe. Her life changes irrevocably after the Germans invade Hungary in 1944, with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, which begins with them losing jobs and possessions, then their lodgings, and finally their lives.

As a child of nine, M.B. witnesses the aftermath of a Nazi atrocity and hears of a flotilla of corpses in the Danube, a trauma that Rubin later evokes in Ten Clear Days in a different but triggering situation. M.B.’s father, who has tried desperately to save his sisters before they are deported to an extermination camp, organizes an escape for his family. They sneak out of the ghetto, remove their yellow stars, and take refuge in a convent. In an interview with Au., another hidden girl remembers M.B. as “our little Marika,” a charming and outgoing child who seemed to exude pleasure like a scent and who brightens the grim, grey religious refuge simply by “showing up.”

M.B. survives the war but is scarred by the terrors she has endured and the pressure put on her because she is a Holocaust survivor. One of her tiny salves is to deduct a year from her age, because “they,” presumably the Nazis, “took it from me, so I took it back.” But the pain and the losses she and her family have experienced cannot be easily forgotten. Rubin adroitly and poignantly alludes to poem 599 from Emily Dickinson, in which she describes the lasting effect of an overriding trauma:

After the war, M.B. immigrates to Canada, where she meets Thomas Beck (originally Goldmann), also a Hungarian but with a less troubled backstory, having fled to England with his mother in 1939. They meet and marry in Toronto, where he has enormous business success, explaining to his children at one point, “The harder I work, the luckier everyone says I am.” As a couple, M.B. and Thomas are heralded philanthropists, but for her the past is more than prologue. She suffers from depression and, after the children are grown, a lack of purpose.

The wait for a planned death, even though M.B. is getting sicker by the day, becomes a celebration of life as three generations rally round, bringing goodies from outside the hospital to tempt her to eat, snippets from news outlets that she might find interesting — such as an obituary of Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general — and downloads of favourite poems and music, including Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

The truly rewarding parts of the book tell of the relationships M.B. has nurtured. Having lost her original family, she has spawned another one, a multi-generational dynasty in which love seems to create ever stronger bonds. That is one of the blessings of having grandchildren: the benefits grow stronger as the responsibilities diminish. Letting go can engender its own reward, as this unusual and memorable novel about family life attests.