WHATEVER THE FUTURE HOLDS

A young couple’s lives are forever changed by a fatal disease in this memoir.

McCann, the author of this touching remembrance, was 15 years old in 1990 and staying at her family’s Vermont summer cabin when she met and fell in love with handsome, witty, and popular 17-year-old Curtis Vance. Their romance was on-again, off-again as Vance’s attention strayed to another girl, leaving the ever faithful author crushed by his inability to commit. Later, in their mid-20s, the two finally became a committed couple and moved in together. Soon afterward, Vance noticed some weakness and other odd physical symptoms. Before long, they found out that members of his family, dating back to the early 1800s, had been ravaged by a rarely discussed but aggressive form of Lou Gehrig’s disease called familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The story then chronicles Curtis’ maturation into a person who was unafraid to love deeply. The theme running throughout the story is that the couple was, in the author’s words, “learning to live while preparing to die.” As the 25-year-old Vance gradually lost his ability to walk and talk, members of the community where he grew up in Danville, Vermont, held weekly healing circles and showed the couple their love. Eventually the pair was forced to make a hard decision when it became clear that Curtis’ ability to breathe would inevitably fail. Over the course of this memoir, the author makes her account vivid with exquisite detail even though the events of the story happened more than 20 years ago. The intervening decades allowed the author to put the traumatic period into mature perspective, and her book effectively allows readers to see how the author continued on with her own life after a long period of grief: “The darkness that enveloped me for so long now only occasionally becomes greater than its forever state of brewing. I make the conscious choice to keep it at bay by concentrating on the sliver of light.” The prose throughout is eloquent but never flashy, allowing the story to shine through.

An engaging remembrance of moving through tragedy and grief with love.