This Mortal Vehicle
June 6, 2009 at 3:13 am (By Amba) (illness, Illness as Metaphor, New Age, sickness, Susan Sontag)
The late Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor to protest the notion that the diseases that strike us have psychological causes or meanings, with its further implication that we somehow bring them on ourselves. A particularly noxious version of such victim-blaming is the New Age belief that we chose the evil things that would happen to us (like being sexually molested at age 3, or gassed at Buchenwald, or getting leukemia) before birth for the sake of lessons we needed to learn, or karmic debts outstanding.
A friend of mine has a delightful rejoinder to that. Courtney (@Courtney1946) is my age and is living with her mother as a caregiver, in a separate city from her own family. That sacrifice makes it seem particularly unfair that she’s been in increasing pain and has just been told she needs to have one or possibly both hips replaced — with no health insurance. No wonder New Age sanctimony annoys her. But I love her solution:
I had not planned on falling apart at 60 or 62, but it seems this body of mine has other ideas. Some of my spiritually inclined friends say that our souls enter bodies and life situations “for a reason”. It ticks me off to hear that. I’m more inclined to believe if we have any predetermined choice at all that it has more to do with other things, like families and friends we belong with or places or work we feel we belong to. Maybe these bodies are like catching a bus. When one comes along that’s going where [you] want, you get on the bus. And if the bus breaks down, you just deal with it. And some of us spend a lot more time trying to get the bus fixed than we planned.
Silly maybe, or my way of rationalizing, but when I was young, I was totally owned by severe chronic migraines and painful gynecological issues. When I had a hysterectomy and then went thru menopause and my migraines almost disappeared, I jumped for joy. I thought I was out of the woods, and just enjoyed living Iife for a few years, never knowing the bus was about to break down again.
Ambiance 