Grief hangs like a pall over the opening section of Christopher Rush’s account of how he came to make a journey in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. A 49-year-old Edinburgh schoolmaster and writer, his life disintegrated in 1993 when his beloved wife Patricia died suddenly from breast cancer after 25 years of marriage, and this book is at once a memorial to her and a story of his own catharsis and re-emergence into the life of the living.
In the first 80 pages Rush describes the onset of ‘the obscenity of cancer’ and its effects on his poor wife’s ailing body in such painfully forthright detail that anyone of a squeamish disposition is likely to wince in horror. After Patricia’s death, Rush was plunged into a nightmare of despair and loneliness when only the presence of his two children and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature provided him with a degree of comfort.
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