|
|
|
1.
|
|
A personal story of crisis, commitment, and hope from the best-selling author of Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you’ve half expected it, you don’t know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it—where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist’s retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich. Alix Kates Shulman is the author of four novels, including Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen; two previous memoirs, including the award-winning Drinking the Rain; and two books on the anarchist Emma Goldman. One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you’ve half expected it, you don’t know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it—where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist’s retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich. "'Every couple who stays together long enough has intimations that a catastrophe is waiting,' Alix Kates Shulman observes early in her remarkable new memoir, To Love What Is. For Shulman, the catastrophe came in the middle of a July night in 2004 when her 75-year-old husband, Scott York, fell nine feet from a sleeping loft in their Maine summer home. He survived, but sustained broken ribs, shattered feet, punctured lungs, and internal bleeding. Most devastatingly, Scott suffered traumatic brain injury, leaving him largely dependent on others, especially Shulman, the noted feminist and author of such books as Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. How York's permanent injury changed this marriage between two people once as fiercely committed to their independence as to each other is the weeping heart of this brave, elegiac work. Both hopeful and terrifying, it's a tale of love's resilience, but also its limits in conquering the sudden cruelties of life. On the surface, Shulman's book is evocative of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, her award-winning memoir about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Yet Shulman's chronicle pierces deeper because her husband does not die. Instead, she is left to mourn his loss even though he's still with her day after day. He looks the same, can communicate though not with the same intellectual acuity, and holds fast to an abiding adoration for his wife. Still, while Shulman celebrates every small improvement, she knows the man she fell in love with is forever gone . . . To Love What Is is a painful book. For some, it will be achingly familiar, mirroring their own difficult lives with an incapacitated spouse, parent, or child. Others may view it as an uncomfortable glimpse into an uncertain future that likely awaits us all, either as caretaker or the cared-for. Yet it resonates most profoundly as a haunting meditation on a love more enduring than the body or mind, and as a potent reminder that even an irreparably altered life is still a life to be cherished. As York sees it, 'he's just getting old; in my version, he's gradually getting better,' Shulman writes. 'Neither is completely true, but we cling to what we must believe, feel whatever it is we feel, see what it suits us to see, depending on the circumstances, the time, our mood, our need. I, too, in a sense, keep making up our story moment by moment, out of hope, despair, anguish, optimism—and love.'"— Renee Graham, The Boston Globe
"This is a suspense story. Will Scott, Alix Kates Shulman's husband of 20 years, get better, get worse, survive, go to a nursing home, kill himself? Will Alix leave him, send him away, lose her mind, compromise her health? These are real questions, and they keep this loving memoir moving forward. Alix and Scott met and dated as teenagers, then lost touch, married others and divorced. Thirty years later, they reconnected and, after 20 happy years, experienced a shattering accident. Scott, age 75, fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The accident did more than shatter his body and rearrange his brain; it erased his personality. The modest, shy, and courtly man he used to be is replaced by a garrulous, nonsensical, and often dirty old man bereft of memory. 'Scott watchers' are needed to attend to him if his devoted wife is to have any life of her own. Typical of others with his condition, he follows his wife around like a duckling, puts his clothes on backward, hides things, insults his caretakers. Shulman writes candidly of her own impatience and irritability and recognizes that without him she would be released from the grinding responsibility and daily bondage of his care but would also face a life without purpose, passion, or love. The couple's predicament is paradoxical: 'The relentlessness of his needs and the frustration of mine are one.' Shulman elegantly pursues this paradox, its surface, its parameters, and its hard core."— Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe
"The most remarkable and memorable part of the story Alix Kates Shulman tells in her latest memoir, To Love What Is, comes early on, before the main event. The book is mostly about what happened after Ms. Shulman’s 75-year-old husband had a terrible fall from a sleeping loft in her rural Maine retreat: He suffered significant and lasting brain damage, and she refused to institutionalize him, even though he must be supervised every waking hour. To Love What Is is a chronicle of the organization and sacrifice involved in keeping her husband at home with her in New York City—a...
|
|
3.
|
|
At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that speaks to us all: to build a new life of creativity and spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment.
...
|
|
5.
|
|
One day it happens: the dreaded event that will change your life forever. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened in a remote seaside cabin on a coastal Maine island—where the very isolation that makes for a perfect artist’s retreat can also put life at risk. Shulman woke to find that her beloved husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same.
In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich. ...
|
|
