LONGER REVIEW: Rue's Butterfly

In this debut memoir, a woman reflects on the life lessons she learned from caring for her mortally ill husband.

Welser relates how she was in her mid-30s, climbing the corporate ladder to greater and greater success, when her life took an unexpected turn. After experiencing a flurry of health issues, her husband, Ray, developed glioblastoma multiforme grade IV, a type of brain cancer so serious that the National Institutes of Health nicknamed it “The Terminator.” Ray lived less than a year after his diagnosis, and suddenly the author found herself a widow. In these pages, she recounts the story of Ray’s illness, told in part through excerpts from the journal she kept throughout the ordeal. “I need a scorecard to keep track,” goes one such entry, “but yesterday, we met with the medical oncologist and the radiation oncologist” is set for today. She fills these sections of her memoir with both the details of her husband’s medical condition and her own striking memories of the experience. “Life support machines make sounds that embed themselves in your brain,” she writes. “They haunt you long after you hear them.” She takes readers through every step of Ray’s decline, including how his cancer affected him mentally, and it’s all written with a direct immediacy. Eventually, the story moves to a hospice and then a funeral home, after which Welser turned her attention to how to live in a world suddenly very changed: “Positive thinking and affirmations help the brain reset itself.” In the final section of her book, she advocates the kind of “emotional agility” that helped her survive.

Readers who have been through personal or medical trials like the author’s will appreciate this upbeat approach as well as Welser’s useful advice for surviving the journey (such as having a “go-to” bag that includes Band-Aids, antibacterial spray, and extra pens). This combination of dogged optimism and practical counsel animates the whole volume, adding it to the subgenre of books by authors who have coped with terminal illness. Readers get the doctor visits, the daily struggles, the momentary flutterings of hope, and the sad resignation that accompany the end of a loved one’s life. This is very effectively done, and Welser transitions her recollections smoothly to the memoir’s final section, which concentrates more on the life lessons she drew from her horrible experience of suddenly finding herself living in a world without the husband with whom she’d planned on spending her entire life. Her guidance in this strand of her story is uniformly quiet and encouraging: “Take a deep breath. A loved one being diagnosed with an illness like this one forces us to face our own mortality.” One strategy that the author stresses involves a “bucket list”—the common self-help idea of creating an inventory of things you want to do before you die in order to feel that you’ve lived life to the fullest. Her own list includes such items as “feed a koala” and “participate in a flash mob.” Welser’s invitation for readers to both compile their own lists and put them into practice will fill fellow travelers with much needed hope in their worst hours.

A tough, uplifting account of a spouse’s terminal illness—and helpful advice for survivors.