The Country Of Illness
Deborah Williams
Word Count 693
I’m going to tempt fate by saying that my entire life has been cocooned in the blessing of good health. There’ve been some difficulties—a preemie, a miscarriage, a hip replacement—but mostly, my physical plant works the way it’s supposed to.
This smoothly working physical engine of mine seems all the more remarkable because my mother has had rheumatoid arthritis for more than sixty years. The disease is a constant presence in her life—our lives—an uninvited, ubiquitous guest: we call it Arthur.
Arthur is chronic. Arthur is an auto-immune disease, the body’s betrayal of itself. Arthur is the call coming from inside the house. It won’t kill you but its treachery slowly shuts down possibility: the finger joints swell, so that’s the end of tennis; the knuckles of the toes explode, so that’s the end of long walks; the vertebrae fray and flatten, so that’s the end of comfort. Sixty years of Arthur is sixty years of medicines to counteract the disease—and then more medicines to counteract the side effects of those medicines. Sixty years of injections and pills and liquids and diets to curtail a disease that corrodes the immune system and turns the bones to balsa wood: soft, spongy, easily broken.
As someone with a compromised immune system, Mom spent much of last year inside. When she went out, she was double-masked and gloved and far from people. It’s people she missed most: there is nothing more my mother likes than conversation and laughter; she is the light of any gathering because she has the gift of making everyone feel welcome, recognized, known.
Arthur’s presence in our lives reminds me that illness is impersonal; it doesn’t differentiate. The doctors use the word “idiopathic” for things they can’t explain: no one really knows why some people got really sick with Covid-19 and others didn’t, no one knows why Mom has RA but her kids (thus far, anyway) do not.
My siblings and I ask Mom questions, offer suggestions: has she tried this, what about that, has she heard about this, that and the other thing?. She smiles and listens but I wonder if our well-intentioned questions are actually aggravations, reminders of the thing she’d prefer not to talk about. She hates what she calls “the organ recital:” discussions about ailments and treatments, doctors and infirmities. Mom would much prefer to talk about books, theater, opera, politics, her grandchildren.
This past summer, when we all gathered for Mom’s birthday (after a two-year Covid-enforced separation), I could almost see the strength she was pulling from us all being together. Her grandchildren vibrate with good health; their blood sings in their veins like the sea, as Dylan Thomas says. Their energy does feel tidal, sweeping the shore of my own mortality, making me aware both of my own continued good health but also of the transience of that fact: actuarial tables might say I’m a long way from dying, but Covid reminds us that none of us are that far from the country of sickness.
A chronic disease is marked by more than just the struggle to live with the illness itself. There is also the struggle to avoid being defined by the thing that’s wrong. For my mom, as Arthur gets worse and she gets older, the borders of the country of illness are closing ever more tightly. “It’s boring,” she says, “all this stuff about being sick. I hate it.” And then she changes the subject, talks about the latest idiocies of Trumpers or what she’s reading for one of her two book clubs.
I think that’s the lesson, right there, although I want to be clear that I don’t think sickness “teaches” us anything; sickness isn’t a metaphor or a punishment or karma. It just is. What my mother’s relationship with Arthur shows me is that a person is not her illness
Even so, as I stand outside of that country looking in, I wish there were a way I could siphon my non-treacherous blood into her body, banish Arthur to some distant kingdom from which there is no escape.
Deborah is a writer and literature professor based in Abu Dhabi. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Common, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and The Rumpus. She is finishing a novel based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who defied convention (and Napoleon) to wander the Mediterranean and the Levant with her much-younger lover. Follow Deb on IG and Twitter: @mannahattamamma.
