Sick season

On illness and other conditions.

Augustine Gleizes, who was a 19th-century “celebrity patient.” Read Emily Wells on this photo.

Given its title, “On Being Ill,” one presumes that Virginia Woolf began writing this fever dream of an essay while sick in bed, ailed, perhaps, by the flu, the common cold, or a headache. I imagine she is, at the time of writing, an interim resident in the land of illness: She is sick, but not mortally sick, her mind dreary as a cloudy day but still capable of brief moments of clarity, when the fatigue dissipates to reveal some sun, some time to compose this astonishing opening passage:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

It is indeed strange how most people insistently avoid or deny the realities of illness, until its inevitability dawns upon them. I did not have such a luxury, raised by a parent with polio (a story for another time). But I have a stark memory of fourth grade, homeroom, being surveyed for my professional ambitions. Back then, I had harbored abstract hopes of being a pharmacologist, and when asked why I, a nine-year-old, presumed to care about pharmacology (which is different than pharmacy), I said: “I want to help my parents when they are sick.” And my teacher, Mrs. Lloyd, asked: “Are they sick now?” (In hindsight, I do not know why she would ask this.) And I said (something along the lines of), “My mother has polio, but she’s not sick sick right now,” and several students turned their head to ask what polio was, which Mrs. Lloyd, being a fourth grade teacher, had no good answer for, and I had a minor epiphany, like the time an old white lady stopped me and my mom in the mall and asked if she could pray for my mom’s leg and I said, “No thank you, we go to church every week,” that I was an unafraid witness of a disease that most Americans believed was eradicated in 1994, that it did not make my mother any less of a competent human, though it damaged and dampened her spirit in inexplicable ways, that our family quietly accepted the disease—and to a greater extent, illness—as a part of life, something not to be conquered or overcome, but to humble ourselves with.

My dad has worked for Baxter International, an Illinois-based healthcare company, my whole life. For many years, he hung an ivory mechanical heart valve on his truck’s rearview mirror, and on long rides, I would stare at its dangling silhouette, which reminded me of a flying saucer. My dad only briefly inspected valves before he was moved to another unit, and I did not think much about them again until I met Evan, which felt quite kismet. Now I think about valves—his in particular—quite often. It was an honor to read and edit his essay “Vegetation,” which was published in Dirt last week. I implore you to read and share it widely. It is about sickness and suicidality, gratitude and grace—how “the will to live cannot be sustained or generated by [illness], or by the memory of it alone.”

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” wrote Emerson. What can a person do about their fear but turn to face it and praise the mystery at the bottom of every fear? I say what I am afraid of so I may, if not move past it, live beside the fear: I am afraid of hemorrhages, hematomas, heart infections. I am afraid of sudden death, of slumping over in the supermarket line while holding a bouquet of vegetables, I am afraid of a humiliating death: an aneurysm dissecting while on top of a lover, slipping on wet stairs and hitting my head. I am afraid of flossing too aggressively. I am afraid that I will die without telling the people who I love what is really on my mind. I wake up sometimes, late at night, to the wailing of sirens, only to find that familiar ticking prevails when the sirens subside. 

Evan’s essay accomplishes what, in my opinion, the best personal writing does; it “lift[s] from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom.” I have this passage from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story underlined, highlighted, and dog-eared: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand … As VS Pritchett once said of the [memoir] genre, ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’” When life gets hard or strange or exciting, which it has been lately, I’ve returned to this quote from Pritchett. It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living. Which isn’t the case for all people, but it feels true to me and my life.