Hard telling of a mother’s pain
BEYOND THE HIGH BLUE AIR Lu Spinney Loot.co.za (R276) Atlantic Books
LIFE can be so cruel at times when it delivers a traumatic event – to a family – of such a magnitude that the individuals involved are never the same again.
Each affected individual deals with the “aftershock” in their own way. There is no training or preparation; one is instantly thrown into the deep end of life.
One such event befell Laura Spinney after her eldest son Miles was involved in a horrendous snowboarding accident 10 years ago, one which eventually claimed his life. Dealing with its consequences and the painful readjustment to their new reality must have been a long and hugely challenging process.
Spinney says: “There is a strange contradiction in writing about a private experience and making it public. I’ve just written a book about a subject that for five years I not only avoided but found bitterly painful to talk about.
“To discuss my son Miles’s situation with anybody other than family or closest friends felt like a betrayal of his privacy; it was too intensely private to share. And now I’ve written a book about it.
“The reason I started is that it felt necessary; I felt compelled to write. There was no catharsis, if that means to release and thereby get relief from repressed emotions. I simply needed to try to understand what had happened to Miles and to us as a family.
“One day I came home from visiting him, went straight up to my desk and wrote about the moment of first confronting Miles at the hospital in Innsbruck…”
The result is an absolutely majestic work of non-fiction literature. Beyond the High Blue Air is a memoir about the years that followed the accident which left Miles in a coma with a devastating head injury. Miles was 29 at the time, bright, athletic with a brilliant future beckoning.
Spinney writes from deep in her heart and soul, and doesn’t hold back on being courageous, brutally honest and passionate. She writes of Miles’s existence imprisoned in a limbo of fluctuating consciousness, at times agonizingly aware of his predicament. She explores the nature of self when all means of communication are lost, the anguish of witnessing Miles’s suffering and the slow-dawning recognition by his family that though Miles had been prevented from dying, he had not been brought back to a meaningful life.
The book and its subject matter are at times hugely distressing, harrowing, heart-warming, depressing, beautiful, despairing, hopeful and ultimately tragic. But Spinney’s magnificent penmanship and the whole family’s seemingly bottomless inner-resources make this compelling read easier for the reader, and hard to put down until its last page.
It is well-nigh impossible not to shed many a tear along the way. Thankfully, very few will have to confront the trauma that faced Spinney and her family. Having said that, many can understand some of the thinking they went through – Spinney’s eventual heartbreaking thought: “I want Miles, my precious oldest child, my extraordinary, beloved Miles who has so enriched my life. I want him to be allowed to die. No, face the truth, I want someone to be allowed to end his life.
“I am unhinged; I am no longer normal. What mother can let herself think like this? Miles’s frustration at his situation has made his life intolerable for him now. He understands, and I believe he does not want to continue.”
She thinks again of Miles’s love for Shakespeare and the words: “To be or not to be, that is the question… To die – to sleep, No More: and by a sleep to say we end the heartache…”
The maternal pain is omnipresent, there can be no “off button” for it, and when the moment for the inevitable arrives: “I look down and observe a woman holding a young man in her arms, see his strong face, his clear jawline, the thick dark hair and long lashes, so dark now resting on his paling cheek. The woman, me, I am gazing down at them both.
“The silence is absolute. There is no next breath. Miles’s breath erased, breath ephemeral as consciousness.” May I add another quote from Hamlet – Horatio says: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
Spinney, her daughters Claudia and Marina, and her son Will are all deserving of our admiration and respect and gratitude for their willingness to share their trauma with us.
The book cover does not give us much biographical information about Spinney. If she wasn’t a writer before, with this book she can be placed up there with some of the most accomplished scribes around.
I urge you to read Beyond The High Blue Sky; it’s not a laughy, smiley read, but a powerful, enormously moving, eloquent and impressive work, one that I am sure will be remembered and appreciated for years to come.
Spinney writes from deep in her heart and soul, doesn’t hold back