Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 18

Illness is bad. But it can be very interesting, especially if it’s your own. Symptoms are fascinating. It’s another world, a bubble one, perhaps, and precarious, but those in it have already found a way to live with it. The skill of physicians and surgeons is inspiring. As is other people’s selflessness. The walls of your experience may narrow to the width of a hospital bed, but it is still a stage, this is your drama and you are the centre of it. A good performance will get good reviews. Understand and please your audience: the visitors who may or may not cluster round your bed; at the very least the volunteer who brings round the library books or the man who wheels the trolley of newspapers and junk food.

‘How are you today?’ they ask. Well, tell them. That’s pleasure in itself. If ill enough, you are excused selflessness and martyrdom.

And if you are temporarily in a hospital ward, try not to hate it. Go with the flow. The social life of the ward is rich and strange, never mind the routine. People elaborate their symptoms and treatments with a relish others share. They support and understand each other. They joke about death. The ward is a mini-tribe, sharing experiences.

In the private ward you have your comfort but you can be lonely, and another patient is more likely to come to your aid than a nurse. Sometimes money is not the universal solution.

When Children Are Ill

There is nothing good to be said about the serious illness of a child and not much comfort to be offered to the parents involved, other than to try to shift the perspective, see the small body as too frail and weak to support the intense existence of the mind and soul of this particular child. See how the latter exists, how clearly and powerfully it becomes apparent even as the body fails. The inner being makes itself clear – let the parents try to gain strength from it. Difficult, because parental distress is based in one of the most powerful instincts we have: to protect and save the children. The mind has little defence in these circumstances. The soul has. It is strong in the child. Those who suffer with children will understand the concept.

You can pray, though your sense of a benign universe will be somewhat blunted. That in itself is unsettling. The prayers would have to overcome your sense that you are picked out by fate for cruel and unjust punishment.

And it might help you, selflessly, to let the child go, to not struggle pointlessly for the continuation of its existence.

You could try Lourdes. I haven’t been there, but they do say that a community of the like-minded, on the edges of despair, within which you don’t have to explain yourself, with standards you can adapt to, however idiosyncratic and peculiar they may seem to the healthy and flourishing rationalist you once were lucky enough to be, can be a great comfort. You’re with the tribe you have inherited. It might seem grotty compared to the one you were born into, but it is a tribe.