Last month I went to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure at the National Mall in DC: friends, including one who had had breast cancer, were running. As I walked down to the Mall, I saw many many many shirts, signs, bags, and banners honoring the survivors. I was proud just to be going to watch my friends engage in the Race for the Cure and to honor these cancer survivors. I felt gratitude for the day, for this life, for all the lives. The mass of families was beautiful, moving, charming, and pink.
I secretly had another feeling, though. All the stuff of survivors made me think about two loved ones of my own who were not survivors. My friend Peggy died in April of lung cancer. And my husband Neil had died 10 years before–not of cancer, but anyway, on that walk I was taking it personally that he was not a “survivor.” I kind of felt like, f*#& you (world) with all your glorification of survivors. But that wasn’t what I really felt, because I was so joyful, too, for the survivors.
Writer–and cancer survivor–Deborah Lewis helped me out with these conflicting feelings with her remarkable column in the LA Times. She starts:
Somewhere along the way in our News You Can Use culture, good health has taken on the patina of virtue. Like good grades and job promotion, health is seen as bestowed upon those who work for it. There’s no excuse for not doing everything you can, not with all the lists of necessary practices in popular magazines, not with all the attention to disease prevention. The flip side of this is the judgment passed on those who get sick.
As I reflected beyond my survivor “issue,” she made me think of the many friends of mine who are facing, or have faced, fertility problems. As with judgments passed on those who get sick, those who struggle with fertility often have the two-problem problem: first, they have the problem getting pregnant or sustaining it. But second, they have the problem of feeling guilty, regretful, a whole host of internalized fears, often related to entrenched beliefs about how fertility is a such a necessary part of being a “good woman” (or a “good man”–I wrote about this a while back here) as well as with notion Deborah offered that health=virtue.
So, I wanted to share Deborah’s column with as many people as I could. One line in particular gripped me: “I do not believe we earn our illnesses, even the illnesses that are directly the result of personal habits.” Read it. It is good for what ails you.
Comments
anniegirl1138 — July 23, 2009
Surviving is a luck of the draw thing, imo.
Deborah Siegel — July 24, 2009
Virginia,
Thank you for this post. I always think of something a VERY wise woman (ok, you), once said: I can have one problem (the physical problem itself), or I can have two problems (the everything else). That line is something Marco and I repeat to each other often, and it helps us get through whatever it is. And we owe that to you. xoD
urbanartiste — July 27, 2009
There was an great piece in the New York Times Sunday Styles over the weekend, "My Heart Messed with My Head," by Michael Winerip. He basically writes how he did all the prevention and genetics is still a major player in his cardiac health. Within my own family I have witnessed life-long chain-smokers live to their eighties, while others who ate healthy and exercised pass on much earlier. I have learned not to associate illness with individual decisions. I hope society does not shift attitudes in terms of health the way it has in external beauty. Everyone one's body and health is different, so expectations and personal responsibility should not be uniform.