One notion I have retained from Christianity is that my body is not me; it is just a shell that will empty when I die. It’s the main reason I would rather be cremated than buried; I would rather not have family and friends gathering regularly at a grave to visit me when I am not there for anyone to visit. I take care of my body because it allows me to do things I love, but at the same time, I don’t let it stop me; I know that I could do many of these things even if I was fat instead of thin, tall instead of short, etc.
But for T, things are not like this. He feels that his body and what it has gone through have helped determine what he has become. Since he was a teenager, the loss of some bone in his leg meant that he could no longer do something he loved, which was sports–and he was a force to reckon with on the court, so he tells me. He has often said that if he had not gotten sick, he would never have become a writer; he would be something else. I would have to agree and even venture that perhaps he would not have become the young man I fell in love with. So perhaps some good has come of all he went through years ago.
But that doesn’t quite erase what he has to go through now. Things increasingly look as though the normal life that took him years to build cannot last, that the physical and psychological process he went through then to be as strong as he was last month, before the injury, will have to be completed again. And perhaps in another six to ten years, again. And again. And again.
He is angry because when he first went through it, he believed that it was once and for all. Just when his whole life is before him (T is turning 25 this year), he learns of the possibility that his body and its problems may continue to interrupt that life. It’s a maddening idea, and it scares me. To me, T has not changed so much. I look at him and beneath the anger, I can still see the man I love. I believe in his strength, and I believe that he has enough of it to pull through. I also believe that he can find a way to be happy regardless of what happens to his body. But I am scared because his body might make things go the other way, might drive him into bitterness forever.
At this point, I would have gone (or a Christian friend would have sent me) to 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, the part in the Bible where Paul talks about an affliction that cannot go away. But it’s difficult (and masochistic, I might say) to delight in pain when you feel that someone so good shouldn’t have to deal with it in the first place. It’s awful to be told that God would repeatedly allow someone to get hurt just so he can prove how great he is by making it all right again. If T’s situation, and the similar situations of others, are supposed to bring glory to God, it doesn’t make me think of heavenly glory, but of the glory a supervillain hopes to gain by pulling strings and endangering the city, just so that he can swoop in at the right moment and look like a hero. It’s cheating. It’s unfair. It exacts too great a price on the psyche and on the body.
The strength T needs now is from whatever the surgeon will put in his leg so that he can walk normally again, and also from the belief that he can take whatever the universe and its invisible heroes and villains, if they are there, will hit him with. But I’m with him in wishing that he didn’t have to keep taking these hits in the first place.
