by Alex Shearer
To witness someone deal with terminal illness does not require a fraction of the courage that it takes to be the one who is ill. But it is still a fearful and exhausting business. It is a process that demands from you that you come to terms not just with the mortality of others but also your own.
This Is the Life is by no means an accurate account by a reliable narrator. Perhaps no one is more unreliable a narrator than an actual witness to events, who recalls things not as they were, but as they might or should or could have been.
But all the same, the story here is based on experience and on truth—particularly the inescapable one that we are all human and will not live forever.
My own brother fell suddenly and seriously ill, and within a few months he was dead. We were close in some ways, but distant in others. We had known each other a lifetime, yet in some respects we barely knew each other at all.
In extremis all the clichés prove true. Blood is thicker than water. You really do not know what you have until it is gone. Life is too short to quarrel. If you love someone you should tell them so while you still can. And your money is no good in the cemetery.
Books can be rewritten, but lives are only lived once. There can be no revisions: the spelling cannot be corrected; the grammar may not be improved. Yet with all its imperfections, this was a life worth living and worth recording.
Siblings are like no one else. Parents look after us, but we don’t grow up with them. Brothers and sisters share our lives in a unique way.
My own brother, like the character in the book, was a talented, intelligent, and gifted man—and yet somehow he never did find his niche. I believe that many families have such members. The problem, maybe, is one of a greater idealism and honesty than the rest of us—who are more prepared to make compromises—possess. There are conscientious objectors in peacetime as in war, and they too pay a price for not conforming to what the majority do.
“He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.” We had to do Machiavelli at school, and that quote always stuck in my mind. My brother’s honesty and idealism did not help him in a less-than-honest and materialistic world.
And then there is Robert Service—a mostly forgotten poet, except perhaps for “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”—who also wrote a poem called “The Men That Don’t Fit In.” It is a verse about those who constantly and restlessly search for their proper groove in life, believing they would make a deep mark if only they could discover what they were good at and where their aptitudes lay.
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.
My brother showed huge courage and stoicism in his last months. I don’t really care for the expression “fighting cancer”; it implies that the person suffering from the disease is in some kind of boxing bout, some kind of fair contest, which—if they lose—implies weakness or deficiency on their part. It isn’t like that. People overwhelmingly are not to blame for their illnesses; they are not combatants, they are patients; they are ill. It isn’t their fault.
Yet my brother did fight—or at least he resisted; he withheld his consent right to the end. The good night surrounded him, but he did not go gentle into it. He was tough. He was braver than I will ever be.
I returned home after my brother’s funeral and felt that somehow it was wrong—it was wrong that he should go, should disappear, should vanish without trace. And so I began to write.
This is not a factual account, but a much fictionalized one. Yet I am proud to have known the person who inspired it, and am glad to have been with him at the end of his life. I miss him. I wish he were here. I always will.
About the Author
Photograph Courtesy of the Author
Alex Shearer has written for television, radio, film, and the stage and is the author of many books for children, including The Speed of the Dark, which was short-listed for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. He was born in Wick, in the north of Scotland, and now lives in Somerset, England.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Alex Shearer
Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Blue Door.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition February 2015
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ISBN 978-1-4767-6440-5
ISBN 978-1-4767-6442-9 (ebook)
