A Short History of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying
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A Short History of Falling – like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and When Breath Becomes Air – is a searingly beautiful, profound and unforgettable memoir that finds light and even humour in the darkest of places. We keep an old shoebox, Gill and I, nestled in a drawer in our room. It’s filled with thirty-three birthday cards for our two young sons: one for every year I’ll miss until they’re twenty-one. I wrote them because, since the end of 2017, I’ve been living with – and dying from – motor neurone disease. This book is about the process of saying goodbye. To my body, as I journey from unexpected clumsiness to a wheelchair that resembles a spacecraft, with rods and pads and dials and bleeps. To this world, as I play less of a part in it and find myself floating off into unlighted territory. To Gill, my wife. To Tom and Jimmy. A Short History of Falling is about the sadness (and the anger, and the fear), but it’s about what’s beautiful too. It’s about love and fatherhood, about the precious experience of observing my last moments with this body, surrounded by the people who matter most. It’s about what it feels like to confront the fact that my family will persist through time with only a memory of me. In many ways, it has been the most amazing time of my life.
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Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying
Title Page
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I might now notice that I haven’t fallen for a while, rather than that I have fallen. This normalization is just taking shape. I had one of these quotidian falls last week. As I was heading out of the kitchen, I caught my sandal in the indentation of the grouting between the floor tiles. My wrists were attached to crutches so that, falling through the door, my body and both arms behaved like three portly figures bustling to be the first out. I was aware of a lot of jostling between these separate components of my body. The momentum took my torso through ahead of the other two fat fellows, with my arms pinned back behind as they followed. As these three oafs who comprised my body clattered through the doorway, what landed first was my chin. And because of the order of my body, my shoulders splayed out and my palms landed with a splat on either side. One crutch was still painfully attached to my wrist, cuffing me to the ground. And my body transmitted to me the physical impression that I had been pinned to the floor by an arresting officer. I didn’t initially attempt to move. I wasn’t particularly hurt; it was more the feeling of profound dismay at having to work out a way to get up from the floor.
Having previously described the siren sounds of my children after they witnessed one of my falls, this fall provided further evidence of the transition along the scale from horror to tedium. There was a brief sound of upset being squeezed out through Jimmy’s ears, but nothing like the previous episodes and nothing from Tom. They had seen it all before. Daddy had now been seen on the floor on a number of occasions, so the sound on this occasion was something like that brief attention-seeking pulse from a police siren that makes you wonder why they bothered. I think Jimmy soon thought better of it and he continued emptying the recycling out from its various containers. Gill came to help, but I told her I was OK for the moment and, dribbling into the carpet, suggested she finish grilling the fish fingers. Tom stepped over me on his way up the stairs. I could hear supper being plated up and I wanted to stay put – perhaps for ever. I was seriously considering the possibility. And nothing about that thought felt in any way abnormal.
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