Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

I looked up the same piece at the library. I had begun to read newspapers. I
had worked out which of their arguments tended to go deeper – that information
wasn’t always at its most useful boiled down to stark, skeletal facts.
The football player’s parents had been savaged by the tabloid newspapers.
How Could They Let Him Die? screamed the headlines. I couldn’t help but feel
the same way. Leo McInerney was twenty-four. He had lived with his injury for
almost three years, so not much longer than Will. Surely he was too young to
decide that there was nothing left to live for? And then I read what Will had read
– not an opinion piece, but a carefully researched feature about what had actually
taken place in this young man’s life. The writer seemed to have had access to his
parents.
Leo, they said, had played football since he was three years old. His whole life
was football. He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident
when a tackle went wrong. They had tried everything to encourage him, to give
him a sense that his life would still hold value. But he had retreated into
depression. He was an athlete not just without athleticism, but without even the
ability to move or, on occasion, breathe without assistance. He gleaned no
pleasure from anything. His life was painful, disrupted by infection, and
dependent on the constant ministrations of others. He missed his friends, but
refused to see them. He told his girlfriend he wouldn’t see her. He told his
parents daily that he didn’t want to live. He told them that watching other people
live even half the life he had planned for himself was unbearable, a kind of
torture.
He had tried to commit suicide twice by starving himself until hospitalized,
and when returned home had begged his parents to smother him in his sleep.
When I read that, I sat in the library and stuck the balls of my hands in my eyes
until I could breathe without sobbing.
Dad lost his job. He was pretty brave about it. He came home that afternoon, got
changed into a shirt and tie and headed back into town on the next bus, to
register at the Job Centre.
He had already decided, he told Mum, that he would apply for anything,
despite being a skilled craftsman with years of experience. ‘I don’t think we can
afford to be picky at the moment,’ he said, ignoring Mum’s protestations.