Brian Verity - Why My Wife Had To Die

Brian Verity - Why My Wife Had To Die 

4⭐

Genre: Non- Fiction, Health, Medical, Autobiography

Pages: 302

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Envelope Books

Date Published: 3rd March 2022

Huge thank you to Envelope Books for sending me a copy of this book to read and review. 

 

Book Blurb: 

When Mary Verity started to display the same early symptoms of Huntington's disease that her mother and older brother had shown, no one took her condition seriously or knew how to respond to it.

From the health and social services departments of the local authority to the government and the church, Mary was given no choice about how to plan for what would become her inevitable physical and mental deterioration.

Support bodies were no help either.  

In this tough, uncompromising book, Brian Verity raises difficult ethical questions about the freedoms granted to carriers of the Huntington's gene to raise children of their own and the lack of freedom given to them to end their lives.

This is not a book with a happy ending, nor have its full ramifications yet been embedded into our supposedly caring society. 

My Review: 

This book was definitely hard to read emotionally as it deals with real people, their emotions and their lives. However, I also think the book touches upon very important subjects and is a very powerful read. It is a very eye-opening book, especially for those like me who don’t know much about Huntington’s disease. This story hooked me from the very beginning and I read this book in one sitting, as I just had to know what happened in the end to Mary.

This book is narrated by Mary’s husband Brian and we see mainly his point of view on how both of them dealt with Mary’s condition. He briefly starts the book with how they both met and then talks about how he first started to notice Mary’s symptoms, which then followed by her diagnosis and then the struggles they both as a couple had to endure as Mary’s condition worsened over the next 2-3 years.

I liked learning about Mary’s story and Huntington’s disease through this book, as previously I didn’t know much about it. So, in that aspect, it was a very eye-opening and heartbreaking read. I also liked that the book showed how little doctors knew about this condition back in the 60s and 70s and how the health support wasn’t the best in that regard from the doctors and local GPs who treated Mary and her family. To me, it displayed how far our medical knowledge and health services improved from the 60s. Additionally, I liked that this book was from a carer’s point of view and how hard and exhausting at times it is to care for your loved ones and to be a carer. This story gave a glimpse of the reality of people who aren’t professionally trained to be carers but still have to take care of their ill loved ones and their struggles physically and mentally.

However, there were parts of this book that were so hard to read. Especially, the author’s controversial obsession with the fact that the only way to stop Huntington’s is to sterilise those who carry the gene or forcibly stop them from procreating. I was quite shocked by some of the opinions he expressed regarding this subject.

I was also quite shocked at how at times he treated Mary, including keeping things from her, being angry with her deteriorating and not being the wife, she was before, as well as,  constantly expressing anger towards her and even having an affair whilst Mary was ill. He openly stated a few times in the book that the more her illness progressed the more his love turned into pity. Part of me realises how hard it must have been to him to see his wife deteriorating and having to deal with all that alone but at the same time, I was rather angry at him because from his accounts all Mary needed was love, empathy and support, because she struggled just as much as Brian did. He also refused to accept any help for Mary from the social services and others, especially if their opinions were different from his about Huntington’s.

Overall: An eye-opening and thought-provoking book that touches so many important topics, including the mental and physical health of carers, voluntary euthanasia, help and support from health services for those with incurable conditions, medical knowledge of conditions in the 60s and 70s and much more. A very important, captivating and worth-reading story that would not leave you for a while. 

About the Author:

Brian Verity lived through the trauma of finding he had married into a family whose members all carried the gene for Huntington’s disease and who suffered accordingly — as he would too, though for other reasons.

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It became his mission to mitigate the consequences of his wife's condition and educate the public about its horrors.

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Following his wife’s suicide, he was questioned at length by the police and kept under surveillance for a year. He went on to campaign for voluntary euthanasia. He died in 2019. 

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Stephen Games, who edited his book, was in contact with Brian Verity in the year before he died, and is available to talk about the raw issues raised by the author and about the wider context of the book.

​https://www.envelopebooks.co.uk/why-my-wife-had-to-die