An Excerpt from Annabelle Gurwitch’s New Memoir, The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker

After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the-blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Precision medicine offered a temporary reprieve—but instead of turning into a cancer warrior, Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion.

Told with her signature wit, warmth, and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies, Kermit the Frog and Samuel Beckett. She accidentally acquires an angel, embraces being in it “just for the sex,” and finds herself on a European van tour selling merch for a heavy metal band.

In this hilariously and deeply affecting meditation on mortality, the actress and activist illuminates life with chronic disease, inequities in care, and celebrates tiny victories, the crusty ends of baguettes, the discreet pleasure of sucking at a hobby, and the unshakable bond of female friendship. She upends the notion of living each day as if it were your last, as she discovers you can carpe diem too much, embracing, instead, the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker below.

Blossoms

It’s always April at my home. Eternally spring. Mentos-sized opalescent blossoms cascade unendingly, some might say relentlessly, on the patterned wallpaper I had installed in my guest bedroom.

The vertical motif mimics a waterfall. I lay on the bed staring until, Matrix-like, the buds morph into streaming 1s and 0s, spraying upward like a digital fountain, heaven bound. It is probably best not to partake in psychedelics in this room.

This wallpaper was a gift from a friend with fabulously extravagant taste. Let’s call him Seamus. Seamus produced a film I acted in twenty-five years ago. We’d stayed in touch intermittently, but when, a decade later, he moved within walking distance of my home, we discovered shared interests: slow-cooked meats, obscure literary works, and vintage textiles.

Wes Anderson, with his meticulously detailed interiors, would have a field day with Seamus’s bold design choices. The wallpaper in Seamus’s dining room is stunning in its verdant lushness. Flower heads the size of baby hippos, pistils akin to Viking spears, ferns you could park a tank inside. The palette of shadowy greens, bruisy browns, fleshy pinks, and bloody reds has emotional impact. Think Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents if the theme were “power struggle in the floristic kingdom.” His daughter’s bedroom was papered with blossoms. The background of the paper is blue—not a babyish Blue’s Clues blue, but a sophisticated blue with grey undertones; a blue that the Pantone Institute color wizards call Dutch blue; a hue I find invigorating and soothing: the hot chocolate of blues.

Adding to the appeal is the texture. Unlike the plasticky vinyl of my 1970s childhood bedroom, chosen because “it’s the easiest to wash,” the salesperson said, accurately pegging me as a here-comes-trouble kid—this paper had granular fibrousness.

“I have extra rolls. Take it,” Seamus said while having dinner at his place, during the early days in my after life.

“Are you sure?”

“What am I going to do with it? You’ll need someone who knows what they’re doing. I have a guy.”

“Of course, you do.”

Seamus is that person who always has a guy or knows a guy who knows a guy. Even if the guy is a woman, she’s a guy, and Seamus knows her.

Back home, I unfurled a roll. I ran my fingers over the thick paper’s frayed edges, placed my nose close to the surface and sniffed. It didn’t have a scent so much as density. It smelled substantial. I promptly deposited the rolls in a cabinet, where they remained for three years. Thus began my annual observance of UOP: Unfurling of the Paper.

What was I going to do with wallpaper?

Wallpaper, vintage or otherwise, signifies the ushering in of a new era. You hang it when you move into a home, when renovating for the birth of a child, or when that child leaves the nest. Not when you’re a ticking clock. Also, I’d heard that vintage wallpaper installation is pricey. Expensive interior design has never figured into my discretionary budget, which at the time was devoted to moisturizers to repair the damage the cancer medication was wreaking on my skin. Making it even harder to justify was a stipulation, from my Covid Zoom divorce, that I sell the home at a future date that loomed ever closer.

I don’t recommend a Zoom divorce. An online ending grants you the opportunity to observe your partnership’s devolution in two-dimensional starkness: bodies that once shared space and time, partitioned into distinctly demarcated territories—boxes—not unlike how your respective belongings have been divided. You and the person you could recognize by scent alone are now suspended in an antiseptic ether, just to reinforce the reality that what you once considered foundational has etherealized. One, or both of you, will freeze, reliably, into an impenetrable version of yourself, trapped in time, preserved in cyber-amber. Take a screenshot. It will serve as a twenty-first-century fossilized record of your marriage’s end that you can later revisit. That is, if you can remember where you saved the recording, which you won’t. And when your internet goes down mid-session, which it will, “connection lost” will appear on your screen, as if you weren’t already aware of that.

It added another ticking clock, added to the one already counting down. Along with my post-diagnosis existential wobbliness, a vacillating between anxiety and depression, rendering decision-making near impossible, there was also the memory of a dubious design choice I’d made before cancer: the ill-fated tricolor paint scheme in the guest bedroom. Inspired by an article on how color blocking could add dimension to a small space, I’d envisioned a subtle but statement-making motif of muted radish, celadon, and a warm cream. The paint colors I purchased were closer to stop-sign red, Lucky Charms leprechaun green, and tighty-whitey. I painted it myself.

“Why is this room the colors of the Italian flag?” I’d been routinely asked for over twenty years. Change comes slowly when you’re on a budget.

Four years into treatment, during my ritual Unfurling of the Paper, I flashed onto the contents of one of the care packages my grandmother Rebecca sent during the last years of her life. The contents were either items she intended for donation to Goodwill, mistakenly sent to me, or things she thought might come in handy. I never asked because I didn’t want to know the answer. A package might contain: an open box of aspirin, the brocade dress she’d worn to my bat mitzvah, an expired can of tuna, three spoons, a signed copy of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel (which I treasure), and a set of new pillowcases (practical). Once she sent an extension cord. It was neatly wrapped around a piece of cardboard, a beaten-up top to a Tiffany gift box. She’d made a notation on the box top, whose distinctive robin’s-egg patina is trademarked Tiffany Blue. Saving this in case I ever get another home of my own—Rebecca R. Gurwitch. My grandmother was living in a modest apartment by that point. She was never going to own another home.

Saving this in case I ever feel my decisions are trustworthy enough to commit to anything that speaks to permanence—Annabelle Gurwitch.

I envisioned my son finding a handwritten note when cleaning out the cabinets after my death. No. My penmanship is so illegible. I’d have to type it up and print it out.

There was never going to be a right time to hang this wallpaper.

“Hey, Seamus, can you connect me with your guy?”

Two weeks later, Peter, Seamus’s guy, set up an elaborate workstation in the room. This had been my son’s playroom, really a toy storage area, then my office, my ex’s office, then his marital “purgatory” bedroom. After we split up, it became the bedroom I rented out to help cover my mortgage. I’d taken the “we’ll do the best we can for as long as we can” call there. I’d been avoiding it ever since, as if the room were somehow complicit in the diagnosis. Was this an elaborate attempt to reclaim this space? Maybe, but I’d also priced out the installation and I could afford to paper only one wall.

During the two days it took Peter to hang the wallpaper, he told me he’d learned how to hang vintage paper, made more difficult by its fragility, from his grandmother in Georgia—the country. He told me that he was an actor and encouraged me to watch his reel, which I never did out of fear that whatever talent he displayed could not possibly be more engrossing than his pre-industrial revolution skill set. Watching him reminded me of Raboteurs de parquet, the floor scrappers, by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. Three men are kneeling, their muscular arms extending with the effort of scraping the veneer of a wooden floor in a Paris apartment. Raboteurs was notable at that time for Caillebotte’s depiction of urban laborers, but I just like the muscular bodies of the workers, the dancerly quality of their movements, and how the sunlight reflects on the floorboards. Peter’s craft demanded a similar amalgam requiring painstaking concentration. The brittle paper needed careful trimming. A wheat paste adhesive was applied with a small brush and smoothed onto the drywall with a wooden hand-rolling tool, antediluvian in appearance. I resisted the impulse to award him a standing O.

Once the paper was up, I experienced that universal post-design-change mania: Now the entire house needed updating. I should wallpaper all the walls in my home. I should do the ceilings. I googled: “Is wallpapering floors a thing?” I needed more of this paper. One of the bonuses of assigning yourself a project like researching vintage wallpaper is that it provides a focal point for any stray anxieties. So, down the rabbit hole I went following the trail of clues from markings along the edgings of the paper.

My pattern, “L’Avril,” is archived on the website of the Thomas Strahan Company, founded in New England in 1866. The exact date this wallpaper was produced was impossible to ascertain as numerous versions appeared over the years. My paper bears the stamp of the United Wall Paper Craftsmen of North America, founded in 1923, so the paper postdates that time.

A deeper dive revealed that the brush strokes on the floral patterns, like those on my paper, were inspired by Chinese and Asian textile designs. It’s a style called chinoiserie, which roughly translates to Chinese-ish. In the mid-eighteenth-century, a chinoiserie room was installed in Buckingham Palace, and the style became popular with the masses, reaching its height in the 1920s and ’30s in America. Its popularity has continued—Anthropologie and Ralph Lauren offer chinoiserie designs.

Had cancer turned me into an accidental Orientalist? At least, I consoled myself, my paper wasn’t one of the more egregious of chinoiserie —patterns that exoticize Asian life with ethnically stereotyped figures, exaggerated eyes shapes, and landscapes lousy with dragons and pagodas. Except, some of those dragons and pagodas looked awfully familiar.

A quick look around my house woke me up. I’d lived for so long, with so much, I had stopped seeing it. My house is filled with Asian-ish objects that my mother, a frequenter of auctions and antique outlets, collected. I have a Trader Joe’s selection of porcelain altar fruits: mangos, apples, pomegranates, eggplant, Buddha’s-hands. Ginger jars, plates, tureens, painted tiles, an enamel fire screen, the ashtray I keep keys in by the front door, the mason jar with the Q-tips in the bathroom. I was the poster child for chinoiserie.

This is what can happen when we research provenances. That’s why it’s a good idea to think twice before sending in that saliva for 23andMe.

The revelation produces the worst kind of ethical queasiness, the kind where you know you’re compromising your ethics, but you don’t want to have to change your actions and you’re looking for any way to square not having to address your participation.

“Do you think mom knew she had chinoiserie?” I asked my sister.

“Oh, definitely,” she said. “Remember how we used to joke that she could recite the dynasties and not our schoolteachers’ names?”

I didn’t, but the benign neglect of my latchkey childhood suddenly made more sense.

I found an essay by Aileen Kwun in Elle titled “It’s Time to Rethink Chinoiserie.” She writes: “a decorative design object is never just an object. It’s a stand-in for what is valued.” Chinoiserie, she writes, should be viewed as a kind of chop suey. The American idea of Chinese food in the 1960s.

It got worse. Traditional American patterns like L’Avril have become co-opted as “cottagecore,” a style trendy with the tradwife set. Had cancer turned me into a trad wannabe?

This is a digital era spin on Phyllis Schlafly’s happy homemaker mythology meets florid fantasy of pioneer women’s lives. The tradwives of TikTok toil away at their wifely duties, spending as much time on eyelash extensions as promoting their lines of sunscreen made from scratch, a product no one needs to DIY and that dermatologists have roundly dismissed as dangerously ineffective. Decked out in prairie dresses, they perform their Stepford Kabuki in front of cottagecore wallpaper disastrously similar to mine. In an attempt to cull the herd, I tried to ascertain items’ authenticity and monetary value.

The altar fruits were of Chinese origin, but assorted jars, dishes, and that fire screen with its enamel pagodas and dragons? Those were troubling. An intricate hand-painted plate appeared to be Japanese, from the Meiji Era (1868–1912). It might be worth several hundred or several thousand dollars. Or, not. It might be a knockoff. My mother kept no records and she amassed these artifacts during both the lean and flush years of my childhood, so the only way to thoroughly investigate would be to engage an auction house. Even if I lived another fifty years, that wouldn’t give me enough time or mental energy to go down that path.

“Annabelle, don’t sweat it. No one loved chinoiserie more than the Chinese. My home is full of it,” my friend, the writer Sandra Tsing Loh assured me when I presented my dilemma to her. That was a welcome vote of reassurance.

My mother was an inconsistent presence, but the tchotchkes she collected during my childhood provide the comfort of continuity, and I’m not giving that up, especially now. Because I’m a terrible person, I fantasize about a future in which my son is saddled with these same objects. He’s showing a friend the vast array of chinoiseries he inherited from his mother on the floor-to-ceiling shelf, custom-built in his 200 square-foot apartment to accommodate them. “The thing is,” he’s telling a friend, “I have no idea if she knew what this was or if it had any value, but she was such an important person in my life, I can’t let go of them.”

It’s been April in the guest room for almost a year now. What was I waiting for? Well, disposable income, there’s that. The cost was not enough to make a difference in my future, but it vastly improved my present. The room is now my sanctuary: The repeated pattern acts like a visual mantra. I also love the word that the paper introduced me to: inflorescence, the flower head of a plant. How did I ever live without that word?

When you visit my home, I will show you L’Avril. I will tell you not to delay in instituting small gestures that add beauty in your life. I will tell you not to make your own sunscreen. I will tell you the checkered history of chinoiserie.

Excerpt posted with permission of the author and Zibby Publishing. The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker is available now.