I loved Richard M. Cohen's Blindsided: Living a Life Above Illness because the author demystified some of the assumptions that we have about chronic illnesses, in this case MS AND colon cancer. Cohen, who is married to Meredith Vieira, wrote of being diagnosed with MS at 25 and dealing with that combined with colon cancer. Through it all, he struggled with the loss of independence and strength but had to deal with the impact of these illnesses on himself and his family.
Strong at the Broken Places seems to be Cohen's way of sorting through the impact of chronic illness on its victims and their families. How is it that people go on? How do they carve out lives for themselves in spite of their illness? Does the illness define the person or is it the other way around?
In preparation for this book, Cohen established relationships with Denise who has ALS, Larry who has Bipolar Disorder, Buzz who has brain cancer, Sarah who has Crohn's disease and Ben who has Muscular Dystrophy. When I hear of these illnesses, I wonder how anyone can live not only with the symptoms of the illness, but with society's ignorance and the stigma that goes with being not-quite-perfect.
Cohen asked the difficult question, probing beyond what might be considered polite. In doing so, he got the participants to confront their own realities and verbalize things that might have otherwise gone unsaid. It's clear from Cohen's tone that he is not writing impassively as a detached reporter. He is trying to sort out his own issues and solidify his own thoughts about his illness.
As I was reading this book, especially Larry's story of dealing with Bipolar Disorder, I thought long and hard about my own struggles with clinical depression. (If you want to know more, just click on the category "depression" to your left.) I have felt the ugliness of the stigma of mental illness. I have had to deal with my own guilt...which I probably would not have felt if I suffered from a more widely recognized physical illness. With most diseases, it is the disease, not the person, that is bad. Unfortunately, with mental illness the two are inextricably entwined and it is very hard for people to not attribute mental illness to some kind of weakness.
To me, the phrase "strong at the broken places," means being stronger than we normally would if we weren't struggling with a chronic illness. It's about NOT letting the disease define us, but instead using the illness to reach inside ourselves and find strength we didn't know we had. It's about taking every opportunity to be an advocate so that people dealing with illness have an easier road ahead.
I don't know what Cohen's objective was when he wrote Strong at the Broken Places, but in my opinion, he accomplished three important things:
1. He gave a voice to those marginalized by society. Who hasn't averted his eyes when seeing a person with a disability? Who hasn't assumed that someone who was slurring her words was drunk or stoned?
2. He illuminated the believe-it-or-not positive aspects of suffering from a chronic or fatal illness. Somehow Denise, whose incapacitation from ALS is a matter of when, not if, manages to empathize with Sarah whose Crohn's disease is probably survivable. Advocacy has given many of these people a new purpose in life.
3. He explored his own feelings about the nature of chronic illness.
The book left me feeling hopeful, not only about my own clinical depression, but whatever diagnosis might be waiting for me or my family in the future. I admire Richard Cohen for his strength in pursuing the goal of publishing his book despite the ravages of MS that have made walking and seeing difficult and driving impossible. He is a living example of living with disease.
Cohen has started a web site which he is using to collect stories about others struggling with chronic or fatal illnesses. You can visit it here: www.strongatthebrokenplaces.com.
Di
Hola
En lugar de criticar escriban mejor las variantes.
Nicolas
Posted by: Nicolas | January 12, 2011 at 11:30 PM