October 12, 2015
In this profoundly moving memoir, author/artist Coutts recounts the two years leading up to her husband’s death after he is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 53. During these years, from 2008 to 2010, Coutts and her husband, Tom Lubbock, who was the chief art critic for the U.K.’s Independent, are in the midst of their careers while raising Ev, their two-year-old son. The disease throws their lives into a tailspin, with daily activities taking on a new and poignant urgency. Ironically, the tumor affects the area of the brain associated with speech and language; as a writer, words are Lubbock’s passion. With great care and craft, Coutts shares her husband’s transition from successful wordsmith to a man who can no longer speak even his wife’s name. As Lubbock begins to lose words, Ev is embarking on his own path toward the acquisition of language, and the intertwining journeys of father and son make this intricate tale of life and death all the more powerful; in the same day, for instance, Coutts shops for a nursing home or hospice in which her husband will die and a facility for her child to begin primary school. Coutts covers many intimate aspects of the dying process, one of the most stirring of which is the inevitable metamorphosis of a cohesive, loving family unit from three to two. Despite the somber topic, readers will be drawn to Coutts’s exquisite portrayal of her husband’s final years.