The Things That Need Doing: A Memoir

by Sean Manning

Published by Three Rivers Press, December 2010

Beginning in late September 2006, fifty-eight-year-old public health nurse and lifelong Akron, Ohio resident Susan Manning endured some thirteen months of hospitalization following a heart attack and cancer diagnosis, the majority of that time spent at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. (Price tag: $2.4 million.) And for all but a couple of days, her only child, twenty-seven-year-old New York City transplant and aspiring writer Sean, was there at her bedside, right up until the moment of her death.

He contends that reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Philip Roth’s Patrimony did little to help him cope with his grief; yet like those two works, The Things That Need Doing is unflinching in its portrayal of sickness—relentless vomiting, coughed-up blood clots, seeping orifices and leaking tubes. Manning also turns his unsparing eye on the hospital environment, capturing everything from the color-coded scrubs to the framed newspaper articles lining the hallways to the different stitching on the white coats of training and attending doctors, all of it “intended to engender trust, allay fear, promote tranquility, emit refinement, and above all conceal the chaos and profaneness truer to its character.”

Tempering this nightmarish drama is Manning’s comically aggrieved Cleveland sports fandom as well as his fascinating family history. His grandfather was a basketball star at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School seventy years ahead of LeBron James. His father rose from rubber factory production line to the company’s front office while Susan changed careers and enrolled in college at age forty. Then there’s the unprecedented amicableness of his parents’ divorce. So close would they remain, in fact, that his father visited the hospital almost as regularly as Sean himself, as did his mother’s siblings and best friend and Sean’s girlfriend, who flew in from New York every other weekend. “What gets most people,” he writes, “is that I went through all this without any brothers and sisters. But…I wasn’t on my own.” Nor is anyone who’s ever experienced or is perhaps in the midst of experiencing the prolonged illness of a loved one—not after reading this inspiring, heartbreaking, often hilarious and altogether important book.

Review by James Frey