Ways to Live Forever (2010): A Child Asks Why

Sam is a fact-obsessed boy in the north-east of England who is at home rather than in hospital because his leukemia is no longer being treated with any expectation of cure. Encouraged by his home tutor, he keeps a notebook and a video diary, filling them with lists, drawings and blunt questions about death that the adults around him keep deflecting. With his friend Felix, another boy from the ward, he draws up a list of things to do: see a horror film, ride in an airship, break a world record, kiss a girl. At home his father cannot bring himself to name what is happening, his mother holds everything together, and his sister resents being the one nobody is worried about. Felix dies first, which forces Sam to confront the shape of his own ending. He works through most of his list and dies at home with his family; the notebook and the video diary are what he leaves behind.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The film's real strength is children's matter-of-fact curiosity about dying set against adults' inability to answer them, and its clear position that a child who is told the truth copes better than one who is protected from it. The friendship between two ill children is drawn as a private world with its own jokes and hierarchy, which is closer to how it actually works than the usual solemn depiction. It also notices the sibling displaced by an ill brother, and the parent who manages by avoidance.

The tone is deliberately buoyant, and the grinding, unphotogenic parts of being ill are kept largely offscreen. The list is completed with improbable smoothness — the airship ride most obviously — in a way that no family in this situation would find so easy to arrange. Sam's death is gentle, well-lit and tidily timed to the emotional structure. Treatment itself barely features; the film is about a boy who happens to be ill rather than about being a patient, which is both its charm and its evasion.

This is a book-versus-film distinction rather than a contradiction. Sally Nicholls' novel has Sam state his subtype in the first pages. The film's distributor synopsis, its plot summaries and its reviews all say "leukaemia" and stop there, and we found no source confirming that the film carries the specificity across.

It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that turns into a confident error three citations later. If you see a precise diagnosis attached to this film, check whether it came from the film or from the novel it adapts.

The film's argument about children is the part supported by how families actually cope, and it is worth stating plainly: children usually know that something is wrong. When the adults go quiet, children do not conclude that everything is fine — they fill the silence, and what they invent is often worse than the truth.

That does not mean telling a child everything at once. It means answering the question that was actually asked, in words that match their age, and not closing the door on the next one. Talking to children about cancer goes through how this works in practice, including the questions children ask that adults dread — whether it is catching, whether it is somebody's fault, and whether the person is going to die.

The film is also right that Sam being at home is not the same as Sam being abandoned by medicine. When treatment is no longer aimed at cure, palliative care is what continues: symptom control, pain relief and support for the whole household, including the sibling nobody is asking about.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the only thing on the list you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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Ways to Live Forever is a gentle film about a hard subject, and its central claim is the right one: children do better with straight answers. Just don't take the airship as a model for how a family's last months actually go.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].