I want to make sure several of you know Joyce Maynard’s memoir, The Best of Us, comes with a trigger warning. It’s about a tough battle with pancreatic cancer. I know cancer, and pancreatic cancer may be a rough subject for several of you. Don’t read any more of this review if the subject is a problem.

Like Maynard’s husband, Jim Barringer, my husband died of pancreatic cancer. I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this book. I’m going to come right out and say when I hear “pancreatic cancer”, I think of it as a death sentence. My husband, Jim, was diagnosed in January and died in February, 2010. But, he had some of the same symptoms as Maynard’s husband for a while before he was diagnosed; back pain, yellowish skin. For us, we blamed those symptoms on my husband’s back that had been broken at one time, and his insistence on tanning beds. By the time he was diagnosed, it was too late for any treatments. We did our best to get Jim’s affairs in order, and he had hospice for only four days before he died.

Joyce Maynard’s book is broken into two parts, Before and After. She had many relationships, and a marriage that left her angry and bitter. She was an independent woman. She met Jim Barringer after they had both been divorced for a long period of time. They had grown children. She owned several houses. They married when she was fifty-nine and he was sixty-one, and hoped to have a long time together, enjoying travel, music, and eventually, grandchildren. Part of that first half of the book is about Maynard learning to be part of a couple, learning to trust, and make decisions with her husband, not on her own. It wasn’t as easy for her to be a wife as it was for her husband to want to be with her and protect her.

But, after a year and a half of marriage, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with a tumor on his pancreas. They chose to fight the cancer with whatever means possible. She did research. They met with doctors across the country, and tried all kinds of treatments from surgery to healthy diets. That was their way of dealing with the cancer. It allowed them to carry on. “The belief that Jim might survive the cancer sustained us.” Maynard reached out to long-term survivors or spouses. Barringer attended a Pancreatic Cancer Men’s Breakfast Club. “Against all evidence to the contrary, we held on to hopefulness.”

Maynard and Barringer were desperate for a future and a normal life. They traveled when they could. Right up to the end, they enjoyed music, even attending a Bob Dylan concert as Barringer’s last time out of the house.

As I said, I knew enough about The Best of Us to know what I was getting into. I knew Maynard’s husband had died, but I wanted to see how someone else handled the diagnosis. How did someone deal with the treatment? We never had to make that decision, and I’m grateful for that, actually. It probably made it easier to cope when we weren’t trying all kinds of procedures. But, it’s never easy for the patient and the survivor to realize they’re going to die. I still remember when Jim said to me, “I”m going to die.”

The Best of Us was just what I was looking for. Joyce Maynard’s account of Before, and the life they hoped to lead is the prelude to the life they were forced to lead, one that really only would have one ending, at least at this time in medicine. It’s not an easy book to read, but I wanted to read her account. It’s a story of life, change, and death.

Joyce Maynard’s website is https://www.joycemaynard.com/.

The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard. Bloomsbury, 2017. ISBN 9781635570342 (hardcover), 437p.


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