Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom

Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet.

Motor neurone disease runs the following course. The nerves that control muscle movement cease to function, leaving the patient unable to move, talk, swallow and finally breathe. Sufferers die, immobile and mute, their senses and intellect unimpaired. The illness is neither curable nor rare. As James Runcie says, in this both joyous and harrowing account of Imrie’s life and death and their 35-year marriage, the individual lifetime risk is one in 300. The numbers are increasing. It doesn’t help to be Scottish, as Imrie was; the disease, it has been suggested, is 67 per cent more prevalent in Scotland than in other countries of northern Europe.

Imrie died in August 2020, aged 72, robbed of the chance to enjoy grandmotherhood, a new house on the coast in Scotland, and an old age with her life’s love. Her last months were suffered in the depths of lockdown. One of the book’s many achievements is its description – unsparing, blackly comic – of nursing someone through a disabling and terminal illness in a world of Zoom consultations and social distancing, where nursing videos and ventilator instructions had to be looked up on YouTube.