Ordinary Last Words

When The Big C started, a diagnosis of terminal skin cancer caused Cathy (Laura Linney) to react with a kind of euphoria; she cashed out her retirement account and treated herself to whatever she felt like and told the people in her life exactly what she thought and generally embodied the #YOLO spirit before it actually had a name. And as fun as that probably would be, these last four episodes have dramatized how much things have changed for Cathy as her disease has progressed: by the end, dying wasn't such a good time anymore.

Spacing the episodes out months apart has made Cathy's cancer seem as though it's devouring her, robbing her first of her independence, then her mobility, then her control of her limbs and bowels and eye, and her memory, and finally leading her to a hospice facility. We should have known from how happy Cathy was to go into hospice -- to let professionals deal with her declining capacities and spare her family her upkeep -- that it couldn't last, and the finale presents Cathy with a cruelly ironic problem: she has to leave hospice because she's lived too long. (Which is to say: her insurance will pay for four months of full-time in-patient care, and she ran through it all.) Cathy is heartbroken to be a burden again; Paul (Oliver Platt) feels hideously selfish not to want her to come back and suffer in the house. The hospice won't even take cash. The whole transaction regarding Cathy's relocation is the show's last chance to criticize this country's health "care" system...though Cathy's insurance does pay for the part-time in-house services of Ina (Marceline Hugot), a gentle nurse whose warm manner helps all the Jamisons to maintain their dignity. So the system evidently isn't all bad. (And Paul can see Ina, so we know she isn't an angel -- just a nice lady who knows that to make a good pie, you have to use lard.)

Cathy spent the show's first few seasons making all the big, spectacular gestures that we all imagine we might if we found out we were dying, what's left is the small stuff that actually matters. Cathy's loved ones take their turns making offerings while they still can. Adam (Gabriel Basso), having busted his ass to squeeze in a year of online credits, gives her the gift of seeing him graduate high school. Cathy's worthless dad (a recast Brian Dennehy) not only admits that he was wrong not to pay extra for peonies at her wedding, but leaves her a cheque for the difference he saved (which Cathy can then pay forward to Ina). Sean (John Benjamin Hickey) makes the gift of his kidney to a stranger -- and not the kind Sean would choose -- in Cathy's honour. And Paul brings Cathy her favourite flowers, not quite making it under the wire. The thought still counts.

Before Cathy's quiet, painless passing at home, she has a couple of last chances to ponder what's imminently ahead. She solicits spiritual advice from a priest, rabbi, and imam visiting the hospice, and seeks their various blessings over her, in the (slightly proud) hope that she can belatedly convince God to end her life at her convenience if she just prays a little. (It doesn't work.) She then asks Sean to help her euthanize herself, despite the fact that vegan kidney donors aren't usually in the habit of ending lives. Anyway, logistical issues derail Cathy's planning, but the effort teaches us all a valuable lesson: if you think you might want to end your suffering from a terminal disease, move to Oregon.

I guess they couldn't give us three clergypersons in the first act and not let them go off in the third. That Cathy's therapist (Kathy Najimy) is another angel (or possibly God) is not a huge reveal, and I was prepared for the cop-out of Cathy opening that office door into blinding light because whatever we choose to call "heaven" is so unfathomable that it can't be shown on TV. And even though I've dipped in and out of The Big C from the start and missed some pivotal plot points, seeing Cathy reunited with Marlene (Phyllis Somerville) in a serene swimming pool really worked on me, by which I mean I cried. Even if it didn't come at Cathy's own hands and on her schedule, it still qualifies as an end devoutly to be wished, and even if she didn't get to make her last words "Lucky me," we know Cathy felt it.