Me Before You.
Content notes: assisted suicide / medical aid in dying, terminal illness, cancer, Alzheimer’s, grief, depression, loss of autonomy. Please read gently.
Welcome to The Crippled Cryptid.
Disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and survival without the performance.
If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Medically complex enough to make my chart a jump scare. I cope with sarcasm and snacks.
Most days are lived in a haunted meat suit with a questionable warranty and a long-standing feud with my nervous system. I spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, but I’m rarely alone thanks to Luna, my medical alert service dog.
Guardian.
Enforcer.
OSHA violation prevention officer.
There’s also M&M.
My Player 2. My soft place to land. The one who shows up when I can’t.
She makes soup. She gives headpats. She watches shows with me. She keeps me sane.
This space is for chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Disability without apologies.
Love without pretending it’s always neat or easy.
(But it always comes with a little dog hair.)
If you’ve been here before, welcome back.
If you’re new, you’ll find your footing.
Welcome to the Lunatic Café.
On today’s menu: Assisted Suidice
Today’s topic is going to be heavy… please read with care.
This is one of those topics I never planned to talk about.
One of the doors I said I wouldn’t open.
And yet, here I am, standing in the hallway with my hand hovering over the handle. Like it might burn me… and it still might.
Lately, it’s been sitting heavy in my thoughts. Heavier since medical aid in dying has become legal here in the United States, specifically in Illinois, where I live, for people with very complex and terminal illnesses.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further.
I am not saying I want to die. I don’t.
I have a lot of things that I want to live for.
I’m saying this is a subject I can’t stop thinking about.
A subject that comes up when I talk with M&M and lands hard between us, because for her, this is an absolute.
Something she says she could never do.
Something she says feels selfish.
As a chronically ill and disabled person, I can’t say I share that belief.
There are things I don’t believe someone should end their life over. Things that can be treated, managed, and mitigated.
Things like depression.
I’ve lived with that particular monster since I was nine years old.
I was diagnosed not long after my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. He was my best friend. Once someone tried to explain cancer to me in terms a child might understand, they did it badly. They didn’t call it a disease. They didn’t call it sickness. They made it sound like a thing. Something inside him, under his skin, eating him alive.
That image never left me. It’s stuck with me ever since.
For a while, treatment worked.
Chemo did its job.
Radiation bought time.
Surgery left scars that would last forever.
And then the cancer won anyway.
Because of that history, because of what I know depression feels like inside my own body, I don’t believe I would ever choose medical aid in dying for mental illness alone. I don’t think that’s a door I would walk through. I don’t think I would leave my family that way.
And I’m not saying that I would judge anyone who does.
But cancer?
Diseases that eat you alive.
Like the cancer my mom had. It started in her lungs and spread everywhere. It took her appetite. It took her ability to leave the house without pain or fear. It took joy itself. Everything narrowed until there was almost nothing left but suffering.
Alzheimer’s.
Waking up one day not knowing who you are, where you are, or when you are.
Looking at the people you love and seeing strangers.
Searching for loved ones who are already gone.
Those are the cases where I understand the argument.
Because I’ve read Me Before You.
I’ve watched the movie.
That story broke something open in me that I still don’t have language for. And yet, I watch it over and over again. Every time I get the chance.
I can see it from both sides, and that’s what hurts the most.
William Traynor didn’t want to die. He wanted to live.
He just knew that he couldn’t do that while he was living in the body that he had. He knew that he couldn’t live the life he wanted. And it was killing him.
He was an athlete. He had seen the world. He had plans, ambitions, a future that existed in motion. Then, suddenly, he was confined to a wheelchair. Dependent. Forced to let others bathe him, feed him, help him use the bathroom. Forced to watch people do the things he loved, knowing he never would again.
He had to watch his best friend fall in love with his girlfriend.
I understand why he wanted to go peacefully after the last treatment failed.
But I also understand her. Lou.
Crazy, quirky, wild Louisa with her bumblebee tights.
She had just found him. Just fallen in love with him exactly as he was. She saw worth, value, beauty, even in the version of him he couldn’t stand to look at anymore.
I hated that she didn’t want to be there when he died.
And I understood why she couldn’t be.
The final scene, when she’s finally in Paris, still guts me.
I wish he’d been there. That he’d seen her at his favorite café.
I know there’s a second book. After You. And a sequel after that, Still Me. I haven’t read them yet, but I think I will. Maybe in 2026. I think I need to reread Me Before You first, then step into what comes after, because this topic sits too close to my own life.
Especially with the seizures.
Especially now that this door exists here, where I live.
There’s another layer I didn’t name at first.
It isn’t about pain alone. It’s about thresholds.
There are pieces of my life that make me, very quietly, understand why someone might stand in this hallway and look at that door. Quietly. Loudly. For too long… longer than they think they should. Longer than they mean to.
If I couldn’t read anymore.
Not the way I already struggle with paper books since the seizures but truly couldn’t read at all. That loss scares me more than I like to admit.
If I couldn’t write anymore.
If words stopped obeying me without the aid of a screen or a keyboard. Writing is how I make sense of the world. Losing it would feel like losing my native language.
If I couldn’t watch movies or shows with M&M.
That shared quiet on the couch, the commentary, the comfort of familiar stories. It’s one of the ways we stay tethered to each other when everything else feels loud.
If I couldn’t play games with her.
Mario Party chaos. Zelda exploration. Small victories that don’t ask my body to be something it isn’t.
If I couldn’t spend time with Luna.
If I couldn’t care for her, interact with her, or feel that steady, grounding presence beside me. She isn’t just my service dog. She’s part of how I stay here.
If I couldn’t cook or bake with M&M anymore.
Hours spent in the kitchen, laughing over new recipes.
Dancing around- talking to Aunt Lise over video call, even if things don’t turn out right. Small victories when things taste better than we think they will.
These aren’t declarations. They’re acknowledgments.
They’re the lines I can see in the distance, even if I’m nowhere near crossing them.
And because this conversation doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it matters to say this about Illinois.
Medical aid in dying here is narrow. It is regulated. It is not a casual decision or an impulsive one. It exists for people with terminal or extremely complex illnesses, with layers of evaluation and safeguards meant to protect against coercion and desperation.
It is not a shortcut.
It is not an escape hatch for bad days.
It is a door with locks, keys, witnesses, and time.
Whether you believe that door should exist or not, it does exist now. And pretending it doesn’t won’t stop disabled and chronically ill people from thinking about it quietly, in the dark, when the losses start to stack up.
That’s why I’m here. Not to persuade. Not to declare intent.
Just to tell the truth about the thoughts that show up when survival gets complicated.
I know Me Before You is controversial in disability spaces. I know why. And I still can’t pretend it didn’t crack something open in me.
Because at its core, the story isn’t just about assisted suicide. It’s about timing, and love that arrives too late to change the shape of a life. William and Lou are not a morality lesson so much as a collision. He had already decided who he was allowed to be in the world before she arrived, and she arrived seeing possibility where he saw only loss. That doesn’t make either of them wrong. It makes the story unbearable. Love doesn’t always save people. Sometimes it only proves how much there is to lose. And that truth, especially for disabled people, is what makes the story linger long after the credits roll.
If something here hit close to home, you’re not alone.
If you stayed anyway, thank you.
You don’t have to earn your place here.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability. Honesty. A little chaos.
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
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If you want to support the long, unglamorous work of survival and mobility:
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