Author Description

[Read by Henrietta Meire] When Lu Spinney's twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, clips the edge of the ramp with his snowboard, he lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma, beginning the erratic loss -- Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness -- that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home, holding out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family's intimate experience, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels like to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney's story takes a turn. The family, and Miles himself, come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Yet even as Spinney allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Miles has been diagnosed as being in a ''minimally conscious state'' rather than a ''persistent vegetative state''; there is no legal way to bring about his death -- a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom.