Should We Stay or Should We Go (4*)

Chris, knowing I have established on expiration date, cautiously recommended that I read Lionel Shriver's latest.  Why not, I thought?  It couldn't be any more frightening than The Mandibles.

Shriver sets up the situation as you might expect:  a happily married couple who recently have experienced an awful parental death pledge to commit suicide by the time both have turned 80.    To say that complications ensue is an understatement because Shriver explores numerous ends to their lives as a result of individual and family decisions, and both social and scientific factors, including a hilarious take on cryogenics.  She doesn't really load the deck either, mostly letting readers draw their own conclusions about what happens to Kay and Cyril who also happen to be on either side of the Brexit morass, which turns out to be a surprisingly apt metaphor given how Brits generally debate it as a matter of life and death.

Still, I wondered what effect the novel would have on my own thinking, mostly because I lack either a spouse or children.  Shriver writes particularly well about the joys of married life and how hard they might be to leave behind.

Their sleep was best in winter and constituted the most winning aspect of the season (in comparison, sod Christmas) when they lowered the thermostat to 12°C and doubled the duvets, the air sharp and fresh in their lungs, their bodies in due course so indolently warm that it felt almost criminal.  An instep cooled outside the duvet would slip bracingly against his calf; a hand warmed under the pillow would cup the side of his neck, making him feel not only safe and beloved, but more profoundly and perfectly present in the single beating moments of his life than he ever felt during the day.  For any given night’s repose comprised a sequence of accelerating ecstasies: from a glissando of descent, to the thick brown mud bath of deep slumber, to an early stirring and serene resurfacing, the return to consciousness as clean, smooth, and uplifting as those super-fast glass lifts in the atriums of modern high-rises, in which you can watch the greenery in the lobby foreshorten  as you ascend, ears popping, to the 89th floor.  The one element of his retirement that he cherished above all was the opportunity for lie-ins, whose sacrifice during his working years he regarded as his most personally costly tithes to the National Health Service. Accordingly, it was mornings riding languid swells in and out of sleep, like rocking lazily in a boat at sea, that he experienced his greatest doubts about their treaty.  The prospect of never again resting in his wife’s arms in bed was enough to make him weep, as resting in her arms nearly made him weep as well, from pleasure.

*  *  *  *  *

In their brief window of privacy, Cyril kissed his wife deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and they withdrew from one another’s lips at last with the same reluctance they both remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim he’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.

*  *  *  *  *

But then, in the last chapter, Shriver does tip her hand when Kay who initially goes along with Cyril's plan without as much certainty, becomes its most articulate advocate. 

“Apparently my blood pressure is all over the map, which makes it much harder to treat.  Obviously, that increases the risk of stroke, which—I need hardly tell a GP—can effectively end one’s life without warning over the course of a few minutes, and some of the worst outcomes are those in which one survives.  I also have a persistent pain in my right shoulder, which I haven’t mentioned either.  It sends pain down the arm and sometimes feels numb; the problem is clearly neurological and could be a symptom of something worse.  Aside from joint replacement, there’s no cure for arthritis and mine is getting worse.  I could probably manage no longer being able to walk but I don’t want to manage not walking. 

Because it’s not as if we can’t live with these ailments. The trouble is that we can live with them, as we can also live with all the other ailments that are coming soon to a theatre near you.  We’re already well into the process of whittling away what we’ve always done, who we’ve always been—making sacrifices by degrees, like frogs in a heating pot.  So it’s already out of the question that we’ll live some sort of fantasy old age in which we’re wise, spry lives of the party until we’re a hundred and ten . . .  I want to let all this go when it still hurts to let it go.  When we can still feel a sense of loss.  When what we’re losing is still whole and not corrupted, and diminished, and made dreadfully sad.  When other people will still be sorry to see us go.”

As far as this arthritic is concerned, I couldn't have sad it better.