The Mercy Papers chronicles a mother’s death, a young woman’s grief Book Review

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance: The five stages of grief as identified by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross are all there in Robin Romm’s The Mercy Papers, a Memoir of Three Weeks. But it’s the first three that have Romm in a vise grip in her raw rendering of the final weeks before her 56-year-old mother Jackie succumbs to the cancer she fought for nine years.

In a non-linear journal of the time she spent on deathwatch in her parents’ house —along with her father, her dog Mercy, other assorted canines and cats, friends, family and a parade of nurses and social workers — Romm seems literally to pour out blood and guts as she tells her story. She minces no words when it comes to the emotional and visual horrors of the advanced disease resulting in tumors protruding through her mother’s skin and threatening to split open her distorted purple breast.

But the book is not without its humorous moments — though they always are tinged with sadness — like a description of Mercy dressed for Halloween in a Brussels sprout hat and an old, green, too-big dog sweater. The levity is lost on Jackie, though, whose steady doses of morphine leave her semi-conscious much of the time.

Throughout the book, Romm struggles mightily with the fact that she can’t tell her mom — once a vivacious, passionate attorney — that it’s OK for her to die. Toward the end, when Romm confesses this dilemma to her mother, she finds it doesn’t matter. “I dun need your permission,” her mother says with slurred speech.

“This is what I wanted to hear; it’s my release,” Romm writes. But even in moments like this, the heavy cloud of dread and grief still hangs over every word, every paragraph and every chapter.

Indeed, Romm does not once blink in her stark tale of death. Her anger and sadness are not tied up in a pretty, silver-lining conclusion. The point of the book seems to only be this: to tell the truth about love and loss.

But there is an important take-home lesson here: Spend time now with the ones you love. In that vein, The Mercy Papers serves as a cautionary tale to those who still have their mothers — and a resonant survivor’s song for those who don’t.

“The Mercy Papers, a Memoir of Three Weeks,” by Robin Romm. Simon & Schuster, 2009. 211 pages.

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by Nancy Larson