Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime by Scott Simon

In July 2013, Scott Simon was vacationing with his family when he received a call from his mother, Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gelbin. Instead of joining them in California as planned, she had been admitted to the ICU in Chicago and wasn’t getting answers from the staff about her condition. After days of getting nowhere on the phone with hospital staff, Simon flies to Chicago to be at his mother’s side and talk to the doctors in person. He arrives to find her hooked up to oxygen and with a grim prognosis.

Unwilling to leave his mother, Simon spends the next week at his mother’s bedside, even sleeping on the floor of her hospital room. During this time, he tweeted messages to his 1.2 million Twitter followers, celebrating his mother during the last days of her extraordinary life. This book is an expansion on those tweets, telling the story of a remarkable woman who was funny, gracious, and kind to those around her even as she was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to countless machines.

While this story would have been touching in the hands of a lesser author, Scott Simon, an award winning journalist and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, is able to tell a story rich with emotion and life. Unforgettable is equally thoughtful, funny, and heart wrenching, a story of a son and a mother who have been through the ups and downs of life together and come out strong. This is evident even in the short tweets that begin each chapter, such as “I tell my mother, ‘You’ll never stop teaching me.’ She said, ‘Well don’t blame me for everything.’” and “I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.”

Unforgettable is a book that touches the heart and will stay on the mind for days after it's finished. For fans of Simon’s radio show, the audiobook version is a special treat.