Now With You, Now Without: My Journey Through Life and Loss
Written and Narrated By: Kathryn Leigh Scott
Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
Mostly about grieving AS someone you love is dying
I s’pose it’s my fault. I kinda read what I wanted into what was in the Publisher’s Summary: that Now With You, Now Without was about grief, guilt, and coming to terms with life and death and everything that can be thrown at a person.
Turns out Kathryn Leigh Scott does her heaviest grieving while her terminally ill husband, Geoff, was declining and not after his death. I get it. What the two of them went through was quite sad, and there was a sense of loss with each thing that Geoff was no longer able to do. Plus she had to cope with the anger he felt at being powerless, helpless in the face of his disease. He had to stand by and watch as independence slipped through his fingers. So in that regard, this book is really good for those of us who are dealing with someone who is in a very slow decline, losing function little by aching little.
But then it’s also quite a travelogue. Because that’s what the couple does to pack as much living as they can into Geoff’s waning days. Sooooooo we hear a LOT about this country or that country or maybe life at their English estate or life at their New York apartment with just a smattering thrown in about sadness, grief. And if you get the idea that these two people were financially loaded, you’re right. How many of us can relate to being able to afford the long-term debilitating diseases that will kill them? Personally, I cringe at the very thought of aaaaaaaaalllll my insurance will NOT cover (yeh yeh yeh: I might be jumping the gun just a tad). And how many of us can pack as much living into each remaining day by traveling the world (Disneyland, anyone? Altho’ I hear tell even THAT’S super expensive nowadays)? The fact that they’re so well off kinda makes the book inaccessible to most of us.
Case in point? When Geoff does actually die, Scott can live anywhere in the world she wants. The house has too many painful memories? Then move to the apartment in New York, of course! Most of us will be stuck in one place, trying to bear grief, stuck in the muck and mire of all that was but will never be again. It would’ve been nice to have an audiobook on that.
So see? It’s not the book’s fault; it’s my own for choosing it, thinking it’d be applicable to someone of my station. Because while not for me exactly, it’s a decent enough book as Scott finds herself being a partner one day then losing that sense little bit by tragic little bit, until finally all she is is a caregiver to a man who was once fiercely independent and filled with life. There is where the grief can be found. What comes after Geoff dies is painful yes, but one senses the utter and guilty relief that it’s all over and now personal choices can be made. The book fairly ZIPS through the grieving process and gets her to where she’s up and dating again, traveling the world again with a man by her side.
Scott narrates this book herself and, as an actress, she has a most agreeable voice and emotion comes through loud and clear. She knows what she wants to say and how she says made me really feel her frustration, her confusion, her sadness. But not her sense of loss. To be fair: It takes her quite a bit of time to find that semblance of normalcy again, it’s just that she doesn’t share with us how to navigate such treacherous times.
A nice bio and autobio, a touching memoir, but for heaven’s sake: Don’t look to Now With You, Now Without for advice or skills to use. We’re on our own for that.
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