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Informationen zum Autor Since graduating with his MA in literature, Mike Mariani has worked as an English professor and freelance journalist, writing feature articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Newsweek, GQ, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, and The Atavist and essays for The Believer, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Pacific Standard, The Nation, and Hazlitt. Some of the topics Mariani has written about include the history of medical gaslighting, criminal cases involving mental illness, the opioid crisis, and the neuroscience of inequality. Mariani currently resides with his wife in Northern California. Klappentext "Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced profoundly disruptive events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances and largely uncharted territory of what happens after one's existence is severed into a before and after."--Page [4] of cover. Leseprobe Chapter One Diminishment Sophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and drive to Koksilah River, an hour north of their homes in Victoria, British Columbia. There, they would spend the day swimming in the glassy jade water, letting the current drag them along the squishy riverbed and gazing at the native arbutus trees, whose red bark peeled like crinkly snakeskin in the summer months. On September 1, 2014, shortly after her grandmother passed away, Sophie—a sweet, reserved girl with gray-blue eyes and freckles—joined her younger brother, Alex, her cousin Emily, and a close friend. They packed themselves into a navy-blue Volkswagen Golf and headed up island to the banks of the long, twisty river. On the way, the group made a quick stop at a Tim Hortons for coffee and breakfast before pulling back onto 1 North. That’s the last memory Sophie, who was nineteen years old at the time, has of that day. It would also be the last memory she would form for the entire next week of her life. Over the years, she’s cobbled together the facts from those who were with her in the VW that morning to create an account of what happened next. About forty-five minutes after the stop, Emily, who was driving, spilled her iced coffee. It started dripping onto her seat, her clothes, even trickling into her shoes, and as she scrambled to clean it she let her attention slip from the highway. The car drifted to the right, eventually veering into the gravel shoulder. The sound of the tires rumbling over the carpet of rock fragments made Emily finally look up, and when she saw how far the car had slipped off the road she panicked, yanking the steering wheel to the left. The wheels struggled to gain traction on the gravel, though, and at a speed of around seventy miles per hour, she lost control. The sedan skidded across multiple lanes in both directions before somersaulting into a ravine on the opposite side of the road. The force of the impact knocked Sophie and Emily unconscious. Hoisting themselves from their seats, Alex and Sophie’s friend were able to push the doors open and escape the mangled Golf. After around fifteen minutes, Emily regained consciousness, but Sophie remained unresponsive. When first responders arrived at the scene, they used the Jaws of Life to pull her out of the back seat. She was immediately transferred to a helicopter and medevaced to Victoria General Hospital. Sophie was rushed into the hospital’s trauma center, designated for treating the facility’s most severe, life-or-death injuries. The large, high-ceilinged room was filled with beds, ventilators, and defibrillators; snakelike surgical lights swooped overhead and bathed the metallic tables and color-coded medical cabinets in bright fluorescent light. Within an hour, Sophie’s parents arrived. After rushing through ...
