THE BEST OF US:: A MEMOIR
by JOYCE MAYNARD

SPOILER ALERT

As said in the Good Reads synopsis I will quote "THE BEST of US is a heart-wrenching, ultimately a life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss." I can wholeheartedly agree with that quote because I have experienced it before myself. I have read somewhere recently where someday in the future there is going to be a medical scan that will show the evidence of a broken heart. In this outstanding memoir of Joyce Maynard's first initial meeting with her husband Jim on Match.com through his last night on earth after a nineteen month battle with pancreatic cancer, I was touched by this memoir to the deepest part of my soul.

Joyce says that no other story that she has ever told before has mattered to her more than this one. I myself was truly touched as I read as to how kind and brave Jim was and how much he truly loved Joyce and how much Joyce truly loved Jim. On July 4th weekend when Joyce was 59 years old she married Jim on a New Hampshire hillside surrounded with friends and family. This was to be the first time in both of their live's that they met their one and only true love partner.

"Remember this moment."

Not too much time passed by since their first anniversary when Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My paternal grandfather, who I loved very much and was very much the Patriarch of the family got the same diagnosis. Things for my beloved grandfather went down hill very quickly. He died in a matter of a few month's of being diagnosed. Jim and Joyce fought Jim's cancer bravely and fiercely seeking out the best medical treatment with Joyce researching on both the
East and West coast's from clinical trials to surgeons to people who had survived asking important questions so they could make informed decisions.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I want to illuminate that before Joyce met Jim she had been single for twenty-five years, her children were all full grown off living their own lives and Joyce thought that she was through with marriage. After having a four and a half hour conversation over the phone with Jim where he talked about real things. He was honest with her about how it was for him growing up with an angry father. How he felt like a failure as a father because he left his wife and his kid's unfairly blamed him for getting out of a marriage that was destroying him. Jim was the most gentlest, kindest, supportive husband to Joyce.

Joyce and Jim met to go out to dinner and he thought she was a more of a knock-out in real life than in her profile picture on Match.com. They both felt strongly that they shared something real about how important parenting to them was. Followed by more dates. Then Joyce announced that she would not have sexual relations with Jim for 30 days because she was impressed with how gamely he was keeping up with her at a yearly festival they went to. Jim slowly moved in but she only allowed him a box for his things and she had a house in Mill Valley and him in Oakland when they married after they sold both properties and bought their home at Hunsaker Canyon.

It started with an endoscopy where the doctor told Joyce and Jim the devastating news that he had a tumor on his pancreas. "How does a person describe the moment her world ends? I felt it in my heart, a blow as real as a knifepoint going in. I thought I might throw up."
"I'm so sorry," the doctor said. "My father died of this." The tumor appeared to be 2.5 centimeters in diameter. The good news was the cancer was known as "locally advanced," meaning it hadn't had a chance to spread to other organs, not yet. The horrendous news was that the tumor had wrapped itself around an important vein in Jim's pancreas.

"In addition to being pressed up against an artery, the term for this stage of cancer was 'Borderline respectable. This meant that the prospects for surgically removing the tumor would be slim. Without surgery, Jim was likely to die within a matter of months, A Year at the most, probably."

After much agony on Joyce's part for it is her voice that is telling the story, all the research she did she and Jim first decided to go with a Dr. Miracle who was in southern California and treated Jim's condition with a drug none of the other doctors in the world were using. They tried that for three or four times at $6000.00 per infusion and then decided to get the whipple surgery which removes the tumor and took fourteen hours but Jim's quality of life was never the same.

My thoughts on the book: Here you had two people who truly found what it meant to be a life partner only to sadly have it snatched away from them by cancer way too soon. The short time they had together they made each other really happy. They were both excellent parent's. They would have made great grandparents. They were both very gallant and brave and strong people to face what they did and still keep functioning so well, they are a true inspiration to me. Before Jim had the whipple and got diagnosed and had the terrible side effects of chemo they were both very spry and active and had a lot of adventure travelling, but not nearly enough in the least of what they both deserved. This book was sad but very well written and I think Joyce Maynard is a very talented, caring person who I hope finds some happiness in the future.

Huge Thanks to Net Galley, Joyce Maynard may you find peace and light, Thank you to Bloomsbury publishing for my digital copy for a fair and honest review.

Sad, but great memoir by a long-time favorite author. Joyce Maynard writes about the death of her husband, and it's just beautiful.

I’ve followed Joyce Maynard for years on Facebook and was aware of her husband’s struggles with cancer. I read her long, beautifully written posts and felt her pain as her beloved husband died. So I was eager to get my hands on her memoir, The Best of Us.

Synopsis:

In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn’t mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of.

Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married, Joyce resolved that no one could alter her course of determined independence. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the nineteen months that followed, as they battled his illness together, she discovered for the first time what it really meant to be a couple–to be a true partner and to have one.

This is their story. Charting the course through their whirlwind romance, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and Joyce’s return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.