Beyond the High Blue Air: A Memoir
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.48 (734 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01MXXLISH |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 572 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-08-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
To read it is to feel, sympathetically, both that pain and admiration for the woman who has written so eloquently through it.'' --John Sutherland, author of The Boy Who Loved Books ''Spinney describes her son's harrowing final years from a uniquely maternal perspective, weighing the appalling ambiguities of his situation with a sensitivity and respect for both the person he was and the person he has become.'' --Wendy Moore, The Literary Review ''Impossible to read this eloquent, heart-breakingly well-written record of a mother's loss without realizing that the people you love are all also standing on the precipice edge Lu Spinney describes so well.'' -
The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. 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. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family’s intimate experience. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney’s story takes a turn. When Spinney’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead .” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma.Thus begins the erratic loss— Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness—that unravels over the next five y
Lu Spinney was born in Cape Town and spent her childhood on a farm in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, later moving with her family to the Indian Ocean coast north of Durban. After university, she left South Africa to live in Nice and Paris before settling in London.
Beautifully written the reader discovers how Lu's intelligent Lorna Welch An honest and heart wrenching read, Lu Spinney's account of her son's life after suffering a traumatic head injury from a skiing accident is a reminder of how a single incident can change not just one person's life instantly but a family's. Beautifully written the reader discovers how Lu's intelligent, healthy and determined eldest son Miles is left immobile and in a minimal state of consciousness