Down Sick
Well, I am quite sick today. My body shivers with a cold tingle and my muscles and bones feel weak and frail. My throat is coarse and the most basic of vocals causes discomfort. The sickness developed suddenly as if the virus or bacteria had to pass a critical threshold to be felt. It crossed that threshold, to my great discomfort.
Just yesterday, I was drinking Negronis and conversing cheerily at a friend's farewell party. I was gay and inebriated, a mix that often encourages unwarranted confidence and perhaps necessitates humbling. The shift from health to sickness is like peace to war, binary in sentiment. When I was healthy, I was happy, perhaps too much so, neglecting that my residence in the land of the healthy is guaranteed to be temporary. Now that I am sick, I am non-hyperbolically miserable. Yes, it’s very unlikely my life is in fatal danger but nevertheless, I cannot lie and say that this malaise does not feel terrible. Compared to health, even a small bit of sickness can feel excruciating, right? I am wishing, a type of thought I try to avoid, to be well, as if I could flip a switch and revert to the greener pastures.
But I write a collection about gratitude don’t I? So, it seems that now is a perfect time for myself, and hopefully you, to give thanks for the days we have been in good health and give thanks for the healthy days ahead. In his wonderful book, The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography on cancer, author Siddartha Mukherjee quotes the below from Susan Sontag.
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Sickness, and its good friend death, are the great equalizers of life, aren’t they? No matter how rich, powerful, fit, smart, and on and on we are, we all are required to venture into the kingdom of the sick. Not feeling my best is perhaps one of the few times that know that I am not the best, that the world does not revolve around me, and that I am all too mortal. My body, and its agenda, will fade to dust. By knowing that I am sick and will be sick(er) again, the obvious is revealed to me. When times are good and I live in the kingdom of the well, there is not much more to do than sit with that feeling, to chew on it for all its rarity and beauty. I need to be grateful now for health, the most important thing. Aspirations for the career, dream—everything—is of trivial importance when my less preferred passport is presented at the gate. I will strive to be the best I can be, as I think we all should. However, if I can live without pain and debilitations, that is not a win, it is the win.
