A SHORT HISTORY OF FALLING
Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying
Joe Hammond
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Joe Hammond 2019
Cover design by Jo Walker
Hand lettering by E Cousins
Photographs here and here © Harry Borden
Joe Hammond asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008339906
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008339920
Version: 2019-08-07
for Gill, Tom & Jimmy
Contents
Doctor Tiago’s Hydroelectric Power Plant
If I could just stop falling over, this would be a funnier book. I’m a big man and I’m starting to cause a lot of damage. I’ve just written off a kitchen cabinet, and two weeks ago I dislocated my shoulder on the bedroom floor. Quite recently I fell into my son’s empty cot, but that was a peaceful experience. The sides of the cot snapped inwards, swaddling me in very fine, soft, white mesh. Given how unsafe I am at the moment, this felt OK. I decided to remain there, looking around. It was quiet. It would have been nice to sleep, but then my other son – my six-year-old – walked in.
If I’m near other people and I sway this way or that, it can seem balletic – like one of those trust games when a person is encouraged to tuck their arms inwards and let others prevent their fall. But often I find myself alone or out of reach, and from a height of six foot three falling always takes so long. Or it feels like it. I seem to have plenty of time to think and notice and worry in that quiet moment before impact. And that’s been quite frightening. Just observing the slowness of my descent and picking both a landing spot and part of my body that seems most capable of taking the impact. And whenever I hit the floor, or something on the way down to the floor, it’s never a funny thing or a funny moment. Never something funny that I want to write about the next day. Last week I fell and split my head open in the shower. And I just lay there. Because if I fall, I can’t use my arms to get back up. I lay there, beached and soapy on the white-tiled floor, with the water raining down turning pale pink around me. And my wife running in like a Greenpeace activist to a seal cull.
I’m getting to the point when I shall look back on these falls as moments of luxury. From a wheelchair or a hoist or a hospital bed, I’ll view these early days of motor neurone disease as a time of freedom. A time when toppling or tripping or tumbling was actually possible. Because I can put my finger through the place where muscles used to be in my legs, right through to the tendons, and can feel something like the substructure of myself emerging. And it’s not a particularly good sign, but it’s not everything. It’s just the physical body. This book is everything – the experience of my body as it changes and declines. The experience of saying goodbye to those I love. I’m scared – I know I am. But it feels strangely OK. And surprising too. I’m going to tell you about it. The story of my end, or as close as I can get to it.
*
The first I knew was about fifteen months ago. It was the sensation that I had a fresh piece of chewing gum stuck to the sole of my foot. Feet feel bigger when they don’t lift properly. My big clown foot, and the funny slapping sound as I ran for a bus. And perhaps I could have fixed this by attaching a piece of string to my big right toe. But where do you stop with such things? How much of a marionette can one person be?
I was walking like a passenger in the aisle of a plane going through gentle turbulence. It’s the walk someone would make just prior to the seat-belt lights coming back on again – that medium level