Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

14
May was a strange month. The newspapers and television were full of headlines
about what they termed ‘the right to die’. A woman suffering from a
degenerative disease had asked that the law be clarified to protect her husband,
should he accompany her to Dignitas when her suffering became too much. A
young football player had committed suicide after persuading his parents to take
him there. The police were involved. There was to be a debate in the House of
Lords.
I watched the news reports and listened to the legal arguments from pro-lifers
and esteemed moral philosophers, and didn’t quite know where I stood on any of
it. It all seemed weirdly unrelated to Will.
We, in the meantime, had gradually been increasing Will’s outings – and the
distance that he was prepared to travel. We had been to the theatre, down the
road to see the morris dancers (Will kept a straight face at their bells and
hankies, but he had gone slightly pink with the effort), driven one evening to an
open-air concert at a nearby stately home (more his thing than mine), and once
to the multiplex where, due to inadequate research on my part, we ended up
watching a film about a girl with a terminal illness.
But I knew he saw the headlines too. He had begun using the computer more
since we got the new software, and he had worked out how to move a mouse by
dragging his thumb across a trackpad. This laborious exercise enabled him to
read the day’s newspapers online. I brought him in a cup of tea one morning to
find him reading about the young football player – a detailed feature about the
steps he had gone through to bring about his own death. He blanked the screen
when he realized I was behind him. That small action left me with a lump
somewhere high in my chest that took a full half-hour to go away.