These morning, two friends, I call them the “Better Angels,” came over to help us clean up after the Open House, put the benches and chairs away, move some things that needed to be moved. Ever since my Open Heart surgery, they have appeared when there is physical labor to be done, and they insist that I wait for them to do it.
They always seem to know when I need help, they appear mysterious and will never accept any kind of payment. They are part of this wonderful revelation for me this weekend, it seemed that America came to me – people from the South and Midwest and Northeast and Southwest and Canada, all kinds of people from all kinds of places.
We mixed as we have always mixed, joined together in a common purpose, relished our differences and found so much to unite us. This is the America I love and will fight for and work for, this is the America that came to me this weekend and filled me with hope and gratitude. Thanks, Angels, I keep telling them I am capable of moving things, but they don’t believe me.
I have never once asked them for help, they just seem to know. Seeing them over the weekend, mixing with all kinds of people who call themselves Americans, I felt like a patriot ready to do battle.
A visitor came into my house recently and somehow managed to look inside my refrigerator, she saw my insulin pens and needles. She went immediately to Maria and confided sympathetically that her husband has health issues also and she knew how difficult it was to cook and prepare food for him.
Maria, bless her, said I did the shopping and the cooking and didn’t seem to have any problems with it.
A few minutes later this same person came up to me, also looking sorrowful and in a low voice with sad eyes said she knew what I was going through.
She looked very sad, as if she had encountered a leper in the streets of Kolkata, or a dying cousin in the hospital.
Why did I wish to slug her rather than thank her? I told her that I was fine, thanks, and didn’t discuss my health with people I don’t know, or even with people I do know.
And I walked away.
Health is just not the most interesting or important or relevant thing about me, why not bring up something of meaning? I am not dying or close to it, and sharing is a creative task, not an invitation to feel sorry for me.
I have two chronic diseases, I am treating them well and thoughtfully, my doctors tell me I am strong and healthy and vital, and that’s the way I feel about myself. The doctors always tell me I have a great “life force,” and will be around a good while.
I am more active, alert and engaged than every before in my life, and I do not ever think of myself as a chronically ill or unhealthy person to be pitied and comforted like a sick child or withering old man.
I make love, work like a fiend, am actively involved in a number of things that bring me great joy and meaning. I have never been happier or healthier.
I twitch at the suggestion that I am a sick person worthy of pity. There are so many people in the world that need empathy and support more than I do, just watch the news. I am bored by the subject of my health, it is of no interest to me. As I get older, I learn to speak of it less and less, or better yet, not at all. It is not who I am.
As I get older, and share my life openly, I find more and more people come up to me, usually looking stricken and pitying, and ask “how is your health?” Quite often they touch my arm or shoulder and tell me they understand what I am going through and hope I make it. Or they tell me a sad story about their own lives.
This is one of the consequences of aging, health is often the currency, language and dialogue of the elderly.
It is not the currency, language and dialogue of me. If I need help and pity, I will surely ask for it, and in the right places. I share my life for different reasons, I am writing a memoir here on the blog, and a memoir is dishonest if it doesn’t tell the whole truth. I can’t pick and choose being authentic and expect people to trust me or read what I write.
Illness is often life itself for people who get older, the body declines and decays. That is not drama for me, that is life. We are all going there, one way or another.
The story of a life is about things both good and bad. Sometimes you get the good Katz, sometimes the bad. That’s the deal. But I won’t lie to you or hide important things.
I see that I have this odd habit of asking for it and not liking what it yields. This, I tell my friends, and dear readers, is the price of being around somebody like me, there are a lot of contradictions.
I’ve had two health issues to deal with this past week, they bracketed the Open House. And they did concern me. I had some nightmarish visions of being rushed to the hospital on the eve of the Open House, and I kept telling the doctors I was going to New Mexico with Maria next week even if I have to go in an ambulance.
One was the discovery of a heart murmur, common in America but potentially dangerous to people with diabetes and heart disease. The other is what may be the onset of a retinal eye disease that may be related to both the diabetes and the heart disease. I underwent testing for the first on Friday, and will go to see a retinal specialist this morning for the second.
I am committed to being open and sharing my life – asking for it as some of you keep telling me – and yet troubled and uncomfortable by the ways in which this information causes people to react and challenges my own fragile sense of identity.
I have a wonderful friend who is dying of cancer, and she tells me the worst thing about it for her is not the pain or fear but the fact that almost everyone around her defines her in that way. That’s all they see in her. For someone who is ill, that is not comforting or helpful.
Her new identity is to have cancer, and much more than me, she experiences a constant stream of pity and compassion. You could say people are simply being thoughtful and compassionate. You could also say they are giving her a new identity, one she doesn’t want.
Empathy is different from sympathy and sympathy is different from pity. I have worked hard all of my life to discover my identity and keep it whole. Pity and sympathy are corrosive, they undermine identity and reinforce the idea of weakness and dependence. Empathy is sensitivity, and the truly empathic don’t treat anyone with pity.
I love it when people ask me about my work or my life. I don’t want people to ask me about my health. It is personal and in most ways, inconsequential, and like my friend with cancer, my health issues do not define who I am.
We will all die of something, and if I’m lucky, it will be my broken but wonderful heart. That, I am assured, and believe, will not be for a good while.
If people want to ask me how I am, perhaps they will ask me about my life and not my health.
And then, rather than flinch, I can say, great, my life is wonderful, and what a great conversation that would be.
