[SPOILER ALERT] “Live Boldly! Live Well! Just Live!” shout the ads for the
tear-jerking melodrama “Me Before You,” which is based on the best-selling
novel by Jojo Moyes. But that’s not the message of the movie, not by a long
shot.
Better Dead than
Disabled is more like it.
Will Traynor, the wildly rich and incredibly handsome hero,
who has quadriplegia as the result of an accident, has decided to end his life
at age 35. Even though he’s fallen in love with Louisa Clark, his relentlessly
charming paid companion, he decides that his life’s not worth living because it
can never be the same as it was before the accident that paralyzed him.
So sympathetically is his decision portrayed in the film, so
persuasive are his arguments in favor of assisted suicide to his family and
Louisa, that I could almost feel the audience, comprised almost exclusively of
young women sobbing into wads of Kleenex, nodding their heads in agreement.
And that’s the problem. The movie’s got it all wrong. I am the founder of FacingDisability.com, a
website that contains more than 2,000 videos of people with spinal cord
injuries (quadriplegia and paraplegia) talking about how they cope. I have interviewed scores of people who are
living with spinal cord injuries, asking them about all aspects of their lives—everything
from rehabilitation to personal relationships. Many of them, injured just like the movie’s hero, and at a similar time
in their lives, have careers, spouses and families and are living rich,
fulfilling lives. They are working as
teachers, architects, corporate executives, health-care managers, lawyers and
doctors. They play sports, take vacations,
go to jobs and raise children. After their injuries, they have chosen to pick
up and carry on to create lives that are worth living. They say it isn’t easy.
But they do not decide to end it all.
It’s a safe bet that most of the people who see “Me Before
You” or read the book (six million copies sold so far) will never know what goes
on in the real world of spinal cord injury. That’s because it’s not likely they will ever encounter a person with
quadriplegia as part of their their daily lives. In a US population of some 320 million, there
are only 280,000 people currently living with a spinal cord injury. And the
fact that spinal cord injuries are so rare makes it easy for people to buy into
the wrong-headed idea that people with paralysis are better off dead.
So the real tragedy of this movie is the power of the Better Dead Than Disabled message that
it foists on masses of unknowing readers and moviegoers who may never know any
better. And for a person with a new
spinal cord injury, and for the people around him, “Me Before You” could even
be an invitation to suicide.
Thea Flaum is the award-winning television producer who
created the TV series with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. She is currently president of the Hill
Foundation and founder of FacingDisability.com, a website for families facing
spinal cord injuries.
