Marianne Brooker

the ways in which MS works like a wintering, deep under the skin: ‘the disease had eaten away at the fatty protective coating surrounding her cranial and spinal cord nerves, so that the tips of the nerves frayed outwards, like the scales of a pinecone, and so were exposed to damage and ruin’.

Around 7,000 people are newly

Around 7,000 people are newly diagnosed with MS each year in the UK. About 10 per cent of those are diagnosed with the primary progressive form: symptoms can be varied but deterioration is persistent, with no remission or cure.

a far cry from making sure that assisted dying is accessible, accountable

were caught in a perfect storm

‘How do we humans share this cradle, this nest, these surroundings,’ Luce Irigaray asks in To Be Two, dancing between philosophy and poetry.

‘The plants live together without difficulty. And we? How do we share the air? … How do we live together … How is the between-us possible?’ This last question is not one of competing autonomies or momentary assistance, but of continuous ethical relation: sharing, enabling, believing, making possible.

Our relations to one another are everything, as constitutive as they can be compromising. ‘We are undone by each other,’ Judith Butler writes. ‘And if we’re not, we’re missing something.’

What has become of us? Disability exposes the structural fragility of social systems. Access to healthcare, social care, housing, food, heat, sleep, leisure time and natural space: each of these fundamental supports are creaking under the weight of capitalism’s crisis, making the space between survival and withdrawal perilously small

Beauty is not a luxury,’ writes Saidiya Hartman, ‘rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.’ Nothing in my mum’s home was unadorned; she met hardship with abundance, a ‘proclivity for the baroque and the love of too much’.

Writing about her own mother, Christina Sharpe explores ‘what beauty as a method might mean or do’

Rather than simple ameliorating harm, beauty makes safety possible.

. But illness forced a new kind of intimacy with which she slowly grew comfortable. Later in her life, she leant in, as if cashing in all the hugs she’d missed