Between Living and Dying: Reflections from the edge of experience, by Ruth Scott

Author: Ruth Scott. Review by Valerie Clarke.

I bought this book because I wanted to compare the author’s experience of lymphoma with my own. Ruth Scott was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Non Hodgkin’s in 2017, and I was told in 2004 that I have an indolent, slow-growing one. We both had a stem cell transplant: she received her own cells back while I got mine from two umbilical cords.

I was an Anglican before I found out about Quakers, and Ruth writes as an ordained Church of England minister. But Quaker Meetings are preferable, she says here, because Anglican liturgy is ‘far too wordy’. I am able to write this review eight years after my transplant but Ruth died two years after hers, in 2019.

Ruth was also a journalist, and this book is a tribute to her ability to write and edit while ill. I had also thought of writing an account of my treatment, but I lacked Ruth’s tenacity and skill. I don’t know how she managed to write so well while coping with chemotherapy and hospital life.

I was pleased to find I agreed with many of Ruth’s thoughts. For example, you soon become used to being a body to be pierced, prodded and examined – a process of ‘being done to, more than doing’. You learn to depend on the expertise of the hospital staff because you cannot heal yourself. This is difficult if you are used to being in control all the time.

Having treatment confronts you with the importance of accepting uncertainty in your life. What you had planned to do must now be abandoned – for a while, or forever. We both had to put our careers on hold even though our minds were still strong, because the disease and treatment made our bodies fragile. But we also both found hope during treatment when ‘things were happening’, then had to deal with uncertainty again when it ended, not knowing if it had worked. Ruth says that hope is ‘about my attitudes and action in the here and now, not about a life hereafter’. I had not believed in a hereafter for a long time but I certainly had to decide what was important when I knew that my illness – or the treatment for it – was probably going to shorten my life. Ruth asked herself: ‘Should I live as if I am fully in remission until symptoms or the next scan indicated that was not the case?’; I am lucky to have been able to live with that uncertainty for many years.

Ruth writes about appreciating the simple things in life, and the small signs of beauty everywhere: the ‘space between’ things in Japanese flower arranging; not having to fill one’s life with activity; being comfortable with the absence of words and sounds, and holding onto a quiet space when it is needed in conversations. She manages to weave many other topical things into her chapters: climate change, the NHS, assisted dying, norms of beauty for females, memory, disability, suffering in the world, trust and transformation, friendship, and God.

Ruth’s hopes for survival were not to be, but this is not an unhappy or morbid book. I am pleased to have read what she wrote while she knew she might soon die. I thoroughly commend it to Friends.

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