"Packer's main characters, Claire and Eliot, are a couple in their 60s who've been married for almost four decades. For the past eight years, Claire has been battling cancer and Eliot has been a diligent caretaker. Caretaking, he reflects, is a daily amalgam of "Helping, soothing, driving, phoning, cooking, listening, tending, waiting, learning, remembering, deciding, forgoing. A lot of forgoing." When the novel opens, Claire and Eliot have just walked out of their final appointment with Claire's oncologist final, because there's nothing more to be done."
"I'd like them to be here with me [Claire says]. Them? Holly and Michelle. .... What I mean is, I'd like them to take care of me. OK. [Eliot] hesitated. The more the merrier? Eliot. Instead of you. Numb, dismayed, Eliot agrees to pack up because he loves his wife and it turns out her deepest wish is that he leave the house."
Claire and Eliot are a married couple in their sixties; Claire has battled cancer for eight years and Eliot has served as her primary caretaker. Caretaking is described as an ongoing sequence of practical tasks and repeated sacrifices. After a final oncologist appointment, close friends visit and provide indulgent self-care gifts, prompting Claire's wry "death spa" remark. Claire asks that her friends, rather than Eliot, take over her care, and Eliot reluctantly leaves. The request forces a confrontation with the limits of devotion, the burdens of caregiving, and the complex moral choices at the end of life. Contemporary literary fiction increasingly examines aging and long goodbyes.
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