Most people hope that when they die, they’ll go surrounded by family and friends. The mother of the radio and television broadcaster Scott Simon was even better attended than that; in a sense, a good-sized section of the internet was watching over her at her deathbed.
As Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gelbin lay dying in a Chicago intensive care unit in 2013, her son was tweeting her last quips and observations to hundreds of thousands of followers. Now he’s written a book, Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime, which interweaves her personal history with that odd, peripatetic record of her last days.
“I don’t think we saw, either my mother or myself,” Simon said of the experience speaking to the Guardian last week, “any reason to draw a Victorian shade over what was happening.”
But it was kind of an accident. Until Patricia went into the hospital for the last time at 84, she’d been quite independent – living with her last husband, cooking her own dinners, going to the movies. Simon had no plan when he began tweeting, but something about his simple account of a common experience truly moved people, triggering a tidal response of the kind only social media can generate.
Patricia had once been a showgirl – “no shrinking violet”, he tells me – and something about her brassy, no-nonsense sense of humour, deployed at such a critical moment, caught on. At one point, unable to rest, she told him to turn on some opera: “I always slept when I went.” At another, she told him: “Believe me, those great deathbed speeches are written ahead of time.” By the time Simon was announcing her actual passing – “The heavens over Chicago have opened and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped onstage” – Simon had generated a phenomenon.
At the time, when I read those tweets and the many articles written about them, I thought that the appeal had something to do with our desire, in an age where many baby boomers are facing their mortality, to speak more openly about death. Simon is decidedly less philosophical. Presented with my theory, he says, “I’m going to leave that for other people – that’s certainly not why I wrote the book.” He just wanted to write a tribute to his mother. And when he starts to say something about his experience of losing a parent being “universal”, he stops himself: “I guess we use that word a lot in journalism now, maybe too much.”
Simon may be slightly underselling his ability to distill a narrative from one of life’s most distressing events. He has been a journalist for over 40 years, and is most familiar to listeners of his NPR show, Weekend Edition Saturday. He got his start on Chicago public television in the 1970s, winning an open audition for a news program despite having only previously worked on “underground newspapers”.
His voice has always been his greatest asset. On the telephone he sounds just the same as he does on the air: measured, calm and mellifluous. Every word sounds like it’s spent serious time being polished and buffed before it is presented to the world. It also has that seductive quality common to every great radio voice, one difficult to describe in print: he just has the knack of sounding nice. His rounded vowels seem to hold the implicit promise that he is speaking just to you.
That doesn’t mean he avoids uncomfortable questions, either. Last fall, he made headlines when he asked Bill Cosby directly about allegations of sexual assault on air. The comedian was evidently put off by the question, remained silent and shook his head at Simon, an experience he still sounds upset about. “It was very uncomfortable,” he admits, though he says part of him had expected Cosby to simply come out and deny that anything had ever happened.
Thanks to those qualities, Simon has become a household name of his own. This book about his mother is his sixth, and he’s also long been a fixture of the op-ed sections of newspapers. And for a brief time in the early 1990s, he hosted the weekend edition of the Today Show on NBC. It didn’t work out. Something about the art of the chipper conversation, a morning-show fixture, didn’t quite fix his personality. (“I feel like I sound witless,” he told USA Today in 1992, of the experience. “I sound like a pompous fool you don’t want to sit next to on a long bus trip.”) But he has still kept his hand in television. Recently, he started doing the occasional television segment for CBS Sunday Morning. “I don’t do just one thing,” he says, because he thinks if he did he would run himself into the ground. “All the things I do, it refreshes me for everything I do.”
On top of this work, he’s also raising his two daughters, ages 12 and eight, with his wife Caroline Richard, whom he married in 2000, aged 48 (he’s very effusive about how wonderful she is). He goes on to tell me that though he enjoys everything he does, there is “drudgery” involved in his life, then takes the word back. “I love cleaning the cat box,” he says, improbably, “because I love my cat.” But the cat is dying of cancer, now, he adds. It’s hard on his daughters.
This ability to make the details of daily life so moving is trademark Simon. At one point during our conversation, I refer to a running joke his mother had with him –she’d often critique his choice of shirt. He laughs at the memory and then says, “Oh, I’m wearing a shirt she once said that about.” And after the interview he emails me a picture. It’s red, with stripes. “I believe my mother said it was fine for weekends, but not the workday,” he writes. “I’ll change before my next appearance.”
