Still Life

July 15, 2019
A debut memoir recounts the difficulties of paralysis and grief. Written using software that tracks the movement of Sutherland's eyes--essentially the only part of his body he can still control--this book tells the story of the massive, unanticipated, and seemingly intolerable changes that the author's life underwent beginning in the fall of 2007. It was then that Sutherland, a 41-year-old obstetrician with a wife and three sons, decided to see a specialist about his left arm. The loss of strength and muscle twitching had led him to suspect it was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis but hearing it confirmed by a neurologist made it terrifyingly real. He suddenly had an 80% probability of dying within the next five years, and even if he lived, he would lose the ability to move and speak. With time to prepare for the inevitable, he spent the next two years taking trips with his family and retiring from his medical practice, making beautiful memories that were nevertheless dampened by the looming disease. Then came the loss of more and more abilities until Sutherland could no longer walk, eat, or even breathe on his own. Even so, he elected to continue living: to learn to accommodate the effects of the disease and not let them rob him of a fruitful existence on Earth. "This book deals with all kinds of change but it focuses on that which we would prefer" to avoid: "change that occurs against our will," writes Sutherland in his preface. "No one wants these changes and still they come. When a negative change occurs, we have to choose how we will face it." Then, in the spring of 2016, a second unimaginable tragedy struck the author's family: His oldest son and his girlfriend drowned while kayaking in the river behind the Sutherland home. The loss took the author--who had already given up so much--to the very edge of his endurance. Sutherland's prose is measured and thoughtful, and his accounts of fleeting moments are made all the more heartbreaking by his understated appreciation of them: "I remember the last time I cradled a newborn baby, and my last week in the hospital, strolling through the medical unit with a walker to keep my balance--recognizing the irony that my life expectancy was now shorter than that of most of the patients in my charge." The author is such a sympathetic narrator, and his story is so mortifyingly tragic that readers will undoubtedly be persuaded by the wisdom he draws from his experiences. The work is by no means a fun read, but there is a serenity to his grief--a literal one--that is unexpectedly reassuring. He comes off not as a prisoner of his own body but rather as a monk in a cell who has been granted a rare opportunity to observe a world that few readers have the patience to see. With immense humility, he questions many of the things that people assume are necessary aspects of the human experience, digging toward a deeper, kinder understanding of life. An affecting account remarkable both in its content and execution.

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