Sickness Shows Us What We Are: I'm not sure where this quote came from, but for years it has lived on a scrap of paper in the top drawer of my desk. And the other day when I was searching through the detritus for a phone number, I ended up holding these words in my palm, thinking about how rough the last two weeks have been: a family member underwent surgery for colon cancer. Another was taken to the hospital with a neurological condition. A high school friend, just into his thirties, has stage 3 cancer. A best friend's mother found out she has breast cancer. An old teammate's father died. Months of stem cell replacement therapy have started for someone's bone cancer. Another was told that it was too late, stem cell replacement won't work--and if a last ditch chemo dose doesn't allow a transplant, this friend only has a few months to live.
Holding the quote I began to think about how true it is. Being sick simplifies everything--it can often make us basic, our most human, and our most pure. But the quote says more about the healthy among us than the afflicted. Our reaction to others' illness speaks volumes.
Finding out all of this bad news has been tremendously sad, and there are days I wish it wasn't so, but I've grown accustomed to death's shadow. When I was 19, a freshman in college, a vascular malformation in the pons of my brain stem bled. Two years later the malformation started bleeding again, and I ended up having brain surgery in Miami. Afterwards, my eyes didn't work. I couldn't walk. My mother nursed me back to health, and helped me begin tending to my depression. Without her unequivocal love, I'm not sure where I'd be. I'm not sure how I would have ended.
And because I've published a memoir (Happy: A Memoir) and 3 poetry collections that all, in one way or another, meditate on what it means to be alive, readers often contact me. After my readings I spend as much time as I can with people who want to share their experiences with illness/addiction/mental illness/masculinity. Sickness and pain can be bottom-of-the-ocean isolating. I know this--I have lived it. I also know how powerful it can be to open up, to share. I feel fortunate to be this person, this listener.
I've been thinking a lot about the people who've reached out to me since Happy was published-I'm particularly struck by the young people who tell me how they've struggled with illness and depression or substance abuse, and by their mothers.
I love these people, listening to their stories, thinking about their lives, because in all of their darkness, there's an incredible amount of beauty and hope. I've met with young people in my community who have felt abandoned by the world because of their illnesses. A young woman told me how alone she felt when she had to have brain surgery when she was in high school, that everyone was thinking about prom and she was wondering if she's be able to walk again. We talked about anger, the endless process of doctor's visits and examinations, how it can feel like a mythological maze. After a reading at Micawber's Books in St. Paul, MN a young man came up to me with his mother. He towered over her, his baseball hat on sideways. He told me that he didn't want to come to the reading, that his mother made him, that he thought it was going to "suck."--his mother shook her head and softly hit his arm--but, he said, he had an "awesome time," that it, for the first time in a while, made him excited. He told me that he was in rehab, had been kicked out of school, and when everything had gone bad in his life his mother was there to help him. I told him he was lucky, that he had a great mom, and he enveloped her with a lanky arm, kissed the top of her head, and said, "Yeah, man, she's the best." As he pulled up his jeans and shuffled away, she reached out, held my hand in both of hers and thanked me. All of their stories are sad, but each one is supported--each has a skeleton of joy and love and hope.
But these last two weeks with its avalanche of bad news have felt different, like hope has been stripped from them. Think a trout's fine bones, somehow, magically, pulled from its body. With no support, it is just a sack of skin and guts. A balloon of blood.
And it didn't take me long to understand why it feels like there's so little optimism. Half of the people I've found out about recently don't have any health coverage at all, and someone in their circle of loved ones has expressed concern about financial devastation. Fiscal anxiety should not be a part of our basic humanity, but more and more, cash makes our decisions.
I got health insurance a few months before my brain started bleeding (I wouldn't have had it if my mother, who raised me by herself, hadn't reminded my father that he was supposed to purchase it for me.) I was lucky. And now, I'm still lucky. If I wasn't covered by my place of work, no insurance company would cover me. Though prices are astronomical, I have insurance. Too many people have no coverage. And for many of the insured, the high costs of treatment/medicine make its use prohibitive. In 2006-2007 it was reported that 20 percent of the US population doesn't have insurance. I live in Texas with 5.8 million uninsured people (1.8 million are children.)
More and more, the people I speak with after readings talk to me about their health care woes, how the financial burden of being alive and staying alive, has stunted their lives.
I want to know why it seems like so many people believe that cash is more important than compassion. Sickness Shows Us What We Are is not only true but it also allows us to see our lives and the lives of those around us with the clarity of kindness. It shows us how much or little we care about other people. It shows us how much we love and shows us how much we don't give a shit. Sickness Shows Us What We Are should be a daily affirmation. A reminder to care. A way to think about how little has gotten done to ensure that everyone, all of us, are embraced.