It is not Christmas fever or holiday blues, but a full spectrum of a human condition of what is to be sick, to be cured, to lose and to triumph. This bronchial curse, you can hear inside the church, meetings or theaters like some coughing symphony that starts on cue.
Some call it the sickness pompous, the spell that hushed the household with desert-like stillness, and felt through its innermost chambers, one in a world unto herself — her own theater.
It is a severe fit of indisposition amounting to a deposition that made me a prisoner of pain and grief these last couple of days.
But the state of sickness is but a magnificent dream to lie in bed, with the daylight curtains drawn to shut out the sun, in a total oblivion of all the works going under it. One becomes insensible of all the operations of life under it, except the beating of our feeble pulse and the agonizing wait for a phone or doorbell to ring (which most of the time it never does!)
No one ever lays down, without a feeling of disappointment. Sickness enlarges dimensions of a person, to become her own exclusive object in the regal solitude of the sick bed where caprices are without control over the catalogue of moans and strong armor of sickness. Wrapped in the callous hide of suffering, sympathy and correct compassion seem to be your only rise; and not to be insulted with soothing fiction.
Then, as you backtrack, you recall that morning sickness, knowing it will be months again before you can see your toes.
Strapped down and delivered into in a place where pain winces off the walls, the obstetrician bearing down like a foreman to this sweating laborer, forcing one life from another, something I’ve signed for at that moment when I would have signed anything. “Give it up!” says one, then adds, “Push!” orders the nurse.
She’s crowning the doctor says — but there’s no one royal but this barefoot peasant, greeting a barefoot infant. In that puzzle of sickness how can anything so beautiful come from so much pain? Never again, I said that time. Until the next time around, as I did FOUR!
But the heart will lead and the head will explain, for it is the common pathway, whatever kingdom may come. And what matters finally is how the human spirit is spent: every morning is the day of joy, the morning to rejoice, for it is the beginning.
Yet to be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. From the bed of sickness, to the elbow chair of healing, the scene of one’s regalities. Hushed are those mysterious sighs, those groans that are so much more awful, not knowing from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they preceded.
And into this flat swamp of healing notes reach me — requests, summons, deadlines, something hard. The quibble relieves me for it seemed to link me again to the petty business of life, which I had lost sight of. A gentle call to activity, however trivial, awake once more from the preposterous dream of self absorption and puffy stuff of sickness. The conundrum of sickness that swells contemplation of one’s single suffering, wasted to a span of giant self importance of which I was so periled lately.
Now, I am once again in my natural pretensions. The same old lean woman, a meager figure of your insignificant columnist. Writing occasional sentences that shimmer on its own, with freedom in expressing whatever narcissistic nonsense that would come. I take pleasure in the show or rapid movements of my pen….as I write with my hand.
Happy Holidays, gentle readers!
