Title: Adam Scott: A Life of Endurance and the Will to Live
Author: Gerald Hollingsworth
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-9845-7155-7
Genre: Biography
Pages: 121
Reviewed by: Allison Walker
Pacific Book Review
Anyone can tell you there is no love stronger than that between a parent and a child. And likewise, there is no grief so complete as when a child dies before their parent. Adam Scott: A Life of Endurance and the Will to Live is a father’s story of his son’s slow, painful decline with one of the most ravaging forms of muscular dystrophy, but also an ode to the life he lived. Adam Scott, the boy, often struggled, but he just as often overcame.
Adam Scott is diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy when he is five years old. From then on, his life was one of back braces and wheelchairs and near constant pain as his body curved itself into new shapes. Duchenne muscular dystrophy, author Gerald Hollingsworth explains, is a genetic disease “marked by progressive weakness and degeneration of the skeletal or voluntary muscles.” Most children with Duchenne MD are in a wheelchair by the time they are twelve years old, and rarely live past twenty. As the disease progresses, the heart and lungs become affected, sometimes necessitating an oxygen machine. As Adam’s disease progressed, he was forced from braces, to a wheelchair, and finally becomes bedridden most of his time. But coming to terms with his fatal illness becomes another struggle entirely. Hollingsworth recalls Adam acting out defiantly, alternately demanding attention and then resenting his codependency. His mother, Ellie, who is his primary caregiver, bears the brunt of these tantrums.
Life with Adam is marked with happiness as well, as Hollingsworth recalls complete strangers going out of their way to lend joy to his son. The Muscular Dystrophy Association provides the family with hydraulic lifts to carry their son in and out of the swimming pool and shower. Comic celebrity and MDA spokesperson Jerry Lewis sends a limousine to pick up the family and taxi them to his Florida suite as a special surprise. Adam is also gifted with visits from Miami Dolphins player Tim Foley and kicker Garo Yepremian, other special idols of his.
Adam Scott is a brutally honest biography, an apology from the author to his wife for years of confusion which he owns as neglect. While Ellie struggles to care for their growing, yet increasingly physically disabled son, the author struggles to create a relationship with this child, a relationship which he knows will only end in heartbreak. While an ode to his late son’s life, the book is also an apology to Hollingsworth’s wife for seeing now the kind of father and husband he wished he had been.
Unless you’ve lived with a person affected by disability, you cannot imagine the plunging heartbreak and resounding strength a family alternately endures and achieves. Hollingsworth not only shares these most intimate moments with his readers, he shares a glimpse into the life of his incredible son, his joys and his sorrows, and the love of the family rallied around him.
