A heart-breaking read. Be sure to have tissues nearby. I don't like having to rate a book like this, it's almost like we're rating the person's experience when it's nothing like that. It's a book about a tragedy but, more than that, the aftermath of this tragedy and how one family dealt with this blow and how grief can be this shape-changing, never-ending process.

Buying this book gave me nightmares.

This book is about the author's brother being hit by a car at age 16 and being severely brain-damaged. Matty Mintern spent eight years in a persistent vegetative state, and then his nutrition was withdrawn and he died.

Reading the blurb and seeing the cover in my to-read pile made me have nightmares about the death of my own two brothers. But now I've read it, I know that they were good dreams compared to what could happen to them.

For some reason I fixated on the intimate details of the story. I don't mean intimate in a positive way. That shortly after the crash the simple act of Matty being raised to a vertical position for physiotherapy made him do an enormous poo. That around this time his family noticed he occasionally got a slight erection, and mistakenly saw this as a good sign. That in his mother's affidavit eight years later, she said that his vegetative life was composed solely of having food pushed into him at one end and coaxed out of the other with suppositories.

I cried twice. Once near the end of the book, when Rentzenbrink dreams of a Matty as old as her instead of sixteen years old. He tells her that he's glad she did it - allowed him to die - and she puts her hand on his face. (Or perhaps it was when Matty died, and Rentzenbrink describes his long coffin and how the accident changed him from being a six foot four tall lad to being very, inconveniently "long"). And once when I went online and looked up Matty's face. I understood what Rentzenbrink meant about the spark in his eyes, and I imagined how it might feel like to look into them and long for their spark to come back.

I'm so glad she wrote this book. It made me think a lot about grief and end of life care.
At first, I kept thinking to myself "surely, you could have coped better", and then I thought about how a 17 year old's world is full of hope and promise. To go through what she did, without the adequate support available now, must have been very isolating.
She is thrown in to becoming a pillar of strength for her family and very little avenue to grieve (1 because shes stuck in limbo and 2 because the world keeps going when she needs a moment to stop and gather her thoughts).
I do wonder if she has ptsd. I took so much more from this than I thought I would when I bought it at an airport. I've even watched one of her talks on YouTube.

holy guacamole, this book was sad. I was okay for the most part but the last 50-70 pages had me bawling for hours, making this a way slower read than I thought it would be. So good, though. Her writing is really engaging and it's not only sad - what did my German teacher use to make us say in tests? - "a tragic story is unhappy but meaningful". And that's what life is about, isn't it, the combination of feeling and meaning. So yeah, this book was fucking perfect.

Vi este libro en un aeropuerto hace un año, y me quedé con su título y el remordimiento de no haberlo comprado, aunque no tuviera ni idea de qué iba. Cuando supe que era una historia real, y además, triste, no sabía cómo iba a sentir. Me duele decirlo, pero no sentí tanto como había esperado. Este libro está lleno de dolor, habla sobre el hermano de la autora, que es atropellado por un coche y acaba en un estado vegetativo permanente (creo que es así la traducción). Nos cuenta la autora su esperanza de una recuperación los primero años, la pérdida de esa esperanza y el sentimiento de culpa que siente al pensar que hubiera sido mejor su muerte. La autora nos cuenta que este libro le llevó mucho tiempo escribirlo, pero me alegro que al final lo acabase. Estaba genial escrito, creo que puede ser de ayuda para mucha gente y es muy crudo y real. Triste, precioso.

Heartbreaking