![]() ![]() Then, when’s that shattered by reality, he must come to terms with his status as an official quadriplegic, which represents a “brutal downgrading of future hopes.” Meanwhile, the final stage of acceptance is infused with a deep sense of self-awareness-or, more accurately, awareness of an immutable loss of self. With heartbreaking candor, Bauby describes the stages of grief for his former life. This is the fate that befell Jean-Dominique Bauby, then editor of French Elle, who suffered a massive stroke at the age of 44 that left him with a rare condition called locked-in syndrome - so named because the body is rendered immobile while the mind remains perfectly functional. Now imagine that you transcend your paralyzed body and pen a memoir via your only means of communicating with the world: painstakingly blinking out each word, letter by letter, from memory. Imagine that you’re fully lucid, but your movement is limited to the slightest rotation of your neck. ![]() Imagine waking up one day to find that you’ve lost all sensation in your body, head to toe. When blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. ![]()
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