This candid memoir lays out the complexities of caring for an ailing partner
Sarah Tarlow built her academic career as an archaeologist researching grief and mourning. Archaeologists have always studied bodies, but Tarlow’s interest is in “mortuary and commemorative practices”, the relationships between the living and the dead. Some of the bodies unearthed by her peers tell stories of care: people who lived many years with injuries or diseases incompatible with survival in the absence of constant attention from others. These finds, Tarlow says, are regarded as evidence of selflessness, even humanity itself, though other mammals behave similarly and caring for someone disabled is not necessarily a purely altruistic act. Now she has written her own memoir of care, followed by the remaking of the relationship between the survivor and the deceased.
In 2013, Mark, Tarlow’s partner of 15 years and the father of her three children, developed the first symptoms of a degenerative disease that was never fully diagnosed. In May 2016, while Tarlow and her children were out on a rare family visit, Mark took a fatal overdose of a drug he had bought online and kept hidden until he judged he’d lost enough to be sure about ending his life while still being able to do it. It was not, Tarlow insists, an irrational decision. Mark was not mentally ill: “Being dead is sometimes better than being alive.” Continue reading...
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