Joe Hammond - A Short History of Falling - Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying

What Dying Really Feels Like Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Arrivals Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Acknowledgements Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

About the Author Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

About the Publisher Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

If I could just stop falling over, this would be a funnier book. I’m a big man and I’m starting to cause a lot of damage. I’ve just written off a kitchen cabinet, and two weeks ago I dislocated my shoulder on the bedroom floor. Quite recently I fell into my son’s empty cot, but that was a peaceful experience. The sides of the cot snapped inwards, swaddling me in very fine, soft, white mesh. Given how unsafe I am at the moment, this felt OK. I decided to remain there, looking around. It was quiet. It would have been nice to sleep, but then my other son – my six-year-old – walked in.

If I’m near other people and I sway this way or that, it can seem balletic – like one of those trust games when a person is encouraged to tuck their arms inwards and let others prevent their fall. But often I find myself alone or out of reach, and from a height of six foot three falling always takes so long . Or it feels like it. I seem to have plenty of time to think and notice and worry in that quiet moment before impact. And that’s been quite frightening. Just observing the slowness of my descent and picking both a landing spot and part of my body that seems most capable of taking the impact. And whenever I hit the floor, or something on the way down to the floor, it’s never a funny thing or a funny moment. Never something funny that I want to write about the next day. Last week I fell and split my head open in the shower. And I just lay there. Because if I fall, I can’t use my arms to get back up. I lay there, beached and soapy on the white-tiled floor, with the water raining down turning pale pink around me. And my wife running in like a Greenpeace activist to a seal cull.

I’m getting to the point when I shall look back on these falls as moments of luxury. From a wheelchair or a hoist or a hospital bed, I’ll view these early days of motor neurone disease as a time of freedom. A time when toppling or tripping or tumbling was actually possible. Because I can put my finger through the place where muscles used to be in my legs, right through to the tendons, and can feel something like the substructure of myself emerging. And it’s not a particularly good sign, but it’s not everything. It’s just the physical body. This book is everything – the experience of my body as it changes and declines. The experience of saying goodbye to those I love. I’m scared – I know I am. But it feels strangely OK. And surprising too. I’m going to tell you about it. The story of my end, or as close as I can get to it.

*

The first I knew was about fifteen months ago. It was the sensation that I had a fresh piece of chewing gum stuck to the sole of my foot. Feet feel bigger when they don’t lift properly. My big clown foot, and the funny slapping sound as I ran for a bus. And perhaps I could have fixed this by attaching a piece of string to my big right toe. But where do you stop with such things? How much of a marionette can one person be?

I was walking like a passenger in the aisle of a plane going through gentle turbulence. It’s the walk someone would make just prior to the seat-belt lights coming back on again – that medium level of mid-flight turbulence. But not on a plane: on the ground. On the way to make a sandwich or brush my teeth. Just walking. With my palms face down, as if steadying myself on the headrests of non-existent passengers.

My first fall was when I was walking Tom to school. We had joined with several mums and their children and it was a cheerful occasion. I made my way to the edge of the pavement to widen our group so that I could chat alongside what was now a phalanx of mums. But as I put my right foot down, I felt only the very edge of the kerb. I’d expected more underfoot. And the rest of my foot fell away from the group. Not off the edge of a cliff, off the edge of a kerb, but somehow I kept falling. There was no correction from either leg, as if each were too polite to be the first to move. So the whole structure of me went down. It all landed between two parked cars. About five or six children looked over me, including Tom, and a number of the mums. Something about the choreography perplexed – I think we all felt that. After the briefest of moments, most of us started laughing. And then I got up and we laughed some more. We laughed about it again when our walks next coincided.