Dead Mom Walking

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Did you find yourself sympathetic to Elaine’s character or shocked by her decisions? Or both? Can you imagine making any similar choices in the face of a cancer diagnosis? 

2. “Cancer wasn’t Mom’s enemy; the ‘system’ was.” In your opinion, did Elaine’s resistance to the “system” go too far, or was she justified in living life—and death—on her own terms? Does Elaine’s skepticism of Western medicine have merit?

3. When confronted with the senselessness of disease, we often look for answers in ourselves—in our own personalities and predispositions—and try to identify behaviours we should have or can still change. Elaine, for example, believed that if she could address some of her psychological wounds, she’d have a better chance of curing her cancer. In your opinion, what role does psychology play, if any, in illness and recovery? Do you believe that faith and positive thinking can affect the course of disease and the healing process?

4. Rachel uses various strategies to persuade Elaine to reconsider her approach to her disease—reason, sarcasm, patience, tough love, family interventions—but continues to hit a wall whenever they try to present their mother with the facts. What are the limits of logic in the face of fear and emotional trauma? As you read the memoir, did you imagine how you might have responded to a loved one under similar circumstances? What emotions did you experience as you witnessed Rachel’s struggle to convince their mother to make different choices? 

5. “‘Everyone has to choose their own path. You can’t save someone. You can support them, you can love them, you can help them. But you can’t actually save anybody from what you see as destruction.’” In spite of Elaine’s insightful advice, Rachel remains convinced that they could have done more to change their mother’s mind. How do you reconcile a parent’s right “to choose their own path” with a child’s need for their parent? Is it ever possible to save or “fix” someone? 

6. For Josh, Elaine’s opposition to conventional medicine and embrace of alternative therapies are consistent with his idea of who his mother is. He believes that the family should accept and support her choices. For Rachel, Elaine’s stupefying decisions in the face of cancer are the result of fear and denial, and effectively suicidal. How do you square the children’s different reactions to how Elaine chooses to treat her illness?

7. “Mom was very caring and loving in her own inimitable way, but she wasn’t much of a capital M Mommy.” In spite of our best efforts to do things differently than our parents, we often end up repeating behaviours or overcompensating for them with our children. What are the effects of Elaine’s free-range parenting style on Rachel? How do her well-intentioned attempts at fostering strength, confidence, and self-reliance shape who Rachel becomes? 

8. The memoir portrays Rachel as the logic-driven empiricist to Elaine’s fear-fuelled seekerism. Yet, beneath their different survival strategies, how are mother and child perhaps more similar than different? How do they both, for example, subscribe to fantasies of control and self-sufficiency, and at what cost?

9. “Mom managed to outqueer me at what was ostensibly my own coming-out party.” In keeping with the traditional definition of “queer” as strange, odd, or unusual, in what ways might Elaine be considered “queer”? Told from the perspective of a genderqueer narrator, how does the memoir use narrative techniques to “queer” the story of cancer and death—that is, tell it from a less conventional or offbeat perspective? 

10. “How could [Mom] be so insightful with others and have so many blind spots when it came to herself? Why was she capable of being so present for other people’s needs and fears and so delusional when it came to her own?” How do you reconcile Elaine’s feminist values, fierce independence, and incisive wisdom with what Rachel describes as her tendencies toward magical thinking, denial, and escapism?

11. The memoir juxtaposes two harrowing experiences in Rachel’s life: their mother’s cancer diagnosis and bewildering rejection of medical treatment, and their high-profile boss’s insidious bullying and the eventual revelation that he was a sexual predator. Rachel feels increasingly destabilized by the distorted realities of these very two powerful people. What are some of the ways in which trauma can become normalized? At what point can denial become a coping and even survival strategy? 

12. Coming of age during second-wave feminism, Elaine wanted to be the author of her own life, pushing back against patriarchy, domesticity, and any norms that would comprise her agency and independence. How might we sometimes wield positive values and strong principles to our own detriment? In what ways can we use our politics to disguise our hurts? 

13. The memoir doesn’t shy away from recounting complicated family dynamics and the stark details of death and dying. As a culture, how do we typically talk about—or often downplay or deflect—taboo subjects like death, bodily decay, and psychological trauma? How does the memoir use humour to explore these difficult topics?

© 2022 by Nicola Spunt