Whatever the Future Holds

This is a difficult memoir to review, because it is so personal, so tragic, so intimate, it is like reviewing someone’s heart.

It starts as an adolescent love story, and moves on to a developing but never easy adult relationship. Thus far I felt perfectly ready to review it – a nicely but uncritically told story, I felt, of a girl who seemed far too much of an eager doormat, too infatuated, too willing to accept small crumbs from a self absorbed young man who from the outset treats her indifferently. The romance is told adoringly, but he clearly wasn’t at all nice and not worthy of her adoration. Even a bit later, when they get together more seriously after years of her gratitude for his occasional moments of (usually unfaithful) attention, even when things start to warm up and they’re tentatively living together, he doesn’t treat her well. Why is she so needy? She’s a sportswoman: capable, able, intelligent, and clearly a lovely person. Sure, he has nice eyes and nice hair, but couldn’t she do better?

But then bam. The young man develops an aggressive form of the invariably fatal ALS (motor neurone disease) and the memoir moves on to infinitely darker places. She becomes by default, and with ever more profound love, his carer. As he becomes sicker and his dependence on her grows, so their relationship deepens. Almost to the end he refuses to believe that his condition is fatal, and though she knows better, they both cope emotionally through living out the fantasy that there will be some breakthrough and he will “beat it”. He will be walking again by Christmas, running around by Spring, getting married, having a family and a long happy life together. As the inexorable decline into life-destroying paralysis continues, they try everything: alternative medicine, group prayer, magical/spiritual thinking, experimental trials. And monumental doses of optimism. It’s a vile disease. Anybody living with ALS will need all the fantasy they can find.

To be truthful, although nobody could read this story without their heart reaching out with compassion, I felt ashamed throughout by how little I warmed to the young man. He’s dying for goodness sake! At the end of the book he’s clearly going to be dead. He must have been dead before the book was written, so he’s dead already. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum! How can I not be liking him? But hey! Why should the dying be any different from anyone else? Most of the rest of us aren’t saints, so why should he be? And in a sense, as the book progressed, I found the answer to the question that troubled me at the start – why was this girl with him at all?

As I read on, I increasingly thought – and I’m not given to such feelings as a general rule – she was with him because it was meant. It was in their stars. This man didn’t know it, but maybe her soul did: he was going to need her, and desperately. His needs were going to be absolute, and he had a right to have them met, and nobody, nobody on the planet, could meet them better, more patiently, more bravely, and more compassionately than this young woman did. Thank god she really loved him!

He dies of course, and death from ALS is brutal. Yet I found it very moving that the singularity of his death was not the end of the book. Death isn’t like that. There is the clearing up, and the funeral, and the slow recovery - stop start, forward and backward. The author confronts these unflinchingly in her narration, as she did the appalling time leading to her lover’s death.

She writes simply and powerfully, and clearly she lived through these times with consummate courage. She managed to eke meaning and strength and love out of one of the vilest experiences that any lover can endure. Young though she was, she found maturity and strength and wisdom to be what he needed her to be, and to see it through to the end. There is a bit of a promise, at the end of the book, that in moving on, she not only carried the memory of her first love, but found new riches, new joys. If anyone deserved this, I’m sure she did.