Review: This Lovely Life, by Vicki Forman

What constitutes a life fully lived?

To what length should that life be required to adapt, and will one's personal strength fall short, or grow far beyond expectation?

How much is too much, and who gets the responsibility and blame for the choices made?

In her novel, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, these questions create the perameter of Vicki Forman's existence. On July 30, 2000, Forman delivered twins at twenty-three weeks, a full seventeen weeks before their due date. The children, Evan and Ellie, each weighed less than a pound. With lungs were the size of dimes, their extreme prematurity meant that they were completely unequipped for life outside the womb. Forman and her husband were convinced that they would not live, and requested that they be allowed a peaceful passing. The hospital refused. Ultimately, Ellie did not survive, but Evan held on, tethered to this world by a web of tubing and wires.

Thus began Forman's struggle, both within herself and with representatives of seemingly every medical profession, to understand and care for Evan. Babies Evan's size are referred to as 'superpreemies', an almost absurd term considering the lengthy list of difficulties and medical disorders these children, and their families are often faced with. Evan is blind, requires oxygen and feeding tubes, and has multiple seizures a day, to name a short list. Yet, the facts of Evan's diagnoses do not even begin to encompass the dire implications for the entire family. Forman's overwhelming struggle with intense guilt, a fearful lack of control, raging fury, and hopelessness are the meat of this story. Evan is Jupiter, and his mother, father and sister are moons, circling the all-encompassing enormity of his existence.

The pull of this novel lies in Forman's frank intimacy with the reader. She pulls nothing, hides no emotion, no matter how ugly or frightening. She makes no apologies for her ambivalence about Evan's survival, for her inability to remember an entire year of her first daughter's life. Her convictions about her son's care never waver - she is interested only in what will give him the best quality of life. At first, that means allowing a dignified death, but as the situation changes, and Forman herself grows mentally and emotionally, we see her rise and morph into a strong advocate for her son on many fronts, going to any distance to seek what is best for him. She talks several times about Evan's role as a teacher, showing her what love, patience, and compassion truly are. Her growth as a mother, and a person, is astounding.

Woven into all of this is the family's coping with the death of tiny Ellie. As Forman begins to accept the cosmic lack of control, and corresponding required lack of expectations, she moves forward into acceptance of both the loss of Ellie and the reality of Evan's personhood. In the final chapter, as the discovery of the twins' birth record allows her to re-envision their birth, we see her moving forward, toward the 'well', and away from the 'but'.

This was a beautifully written account. The knowledge of Evan's death, which occured soon after it was written, made it even more poignant to read, because I knew how and when it would end, even though the author herself didn't at the time. In the epilogue, Forman writes that she wonders if Evan's death means that he was finished with her, because she was not finished with him. I think that the truth is, Evan had taught her everything he could, and so he moved on to wait for her to once again catch up.

Rating: five stars. A heartrending story from the depths of parenting.