A Whole Life: An Illness and a Healing. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Matthew Berke

The novelist Reynolds Price gives a detailed account of his fight with spinal cancer and the aggressive treatment that left him paralyzed in the lower part of his body. Given his slim chance of survival at the start, and the brutal regimen of surgery, radiation, and drugs that lay ahead, Mr. Price might have been a good candidate for the ministrations of a euthanasia practitioner such as Dr.

Jack Kevorkian. Yet, despite unfavorable odds and many "pitch black nights of roaring pain," he found the resources within himself, and in his admittedly unorthodox, unchurchly Christian faith, to "choose life." A bachelor (clearly of the sort once described as "confirmed"), Mr. Price could no longer enjoy the pleasures of sex, but he still managed to make for himself "a whole new life," centered on work, in the radically changed circumstances of a severe handicap - and to consider himself, in the end, "a grateful man." While Mr. Price's narrative is often grim, it is not despairing or self-pitying. Those of us who are typically less than courageous patients may find inspiration in the way he has made his ordeal redemptive without romanticizing or beatifying suffering. Much food for thought here on the mind-body connection, plus a real alternative to euthanasia: faith.