You have never loved me enough

[rinue]

A routine of the morning is that I come down to the kitchen and turn off NPR. Mom and Dad listen to it while they eat breakfast and then leave the radio on while they go to do other things. By the time I am awake and down the stairs, we have reached the midday hours of aggravating programming, the slot where they dump fatuous people promoting this and that and opining naively on subjects in which I have more insight. (Somehow I always have more insight than people in this timeslot. It's like people woke up and decided to write books on subjects they'd never studied and of which they possessed no special expertise, and decided additionally not to consider those subjects but simply to get words out as soon as possible. Nanowrimo?)

Today it was some guy whining that when he'd had cancer the supportive community around him didn't do enough. Like, they'd say they kept him in their thoughts, but he knows there were whole hours of the day when they weren't thinking of him, even though in those same hours he had cancer. Or lots of people would come visit and would say "what can I do to help," but that put such a burden on him to ask him to help them help, and if they'd really been friends they would have just known what he might have wanted picked up from CVS, or whether his plants needed watering, or whether to walk the dog or what food the dog eats and when.

Basically, he wants us all to know that if you've ever known someone ill and haven't dropped your whole life to grieve for them while at the same time providing everything they might want, which you know instinctively or spend hours painstakingly deducing, you might as well have done nothing, because you have oafishly ruined their special day with your inadequate forms of caring.

I didn't know there could be a cancer bridezilla. Turns out egomania knows no bounds.

Comments

[movingfinger]

Cancer bridezilla. Heh---yes. Yes. But it's not just cancer, of course, and the type isn't new either...

I wonder if Salon would run a little piece on this if you filled it out. It would certainly get the eyeballs.

[rinue]

Hmmm. I've never submitted to them and don't know what they look for. What sort of thing were you thinking? And thanks. :)

[movingfinger]

The eyerolling recognition from readers of this anecdote hints that you've pegged a recognized type here. Maybe a cautionary "So you've been diagnosed. Don't be this guy" angle would be kinder, but it wouldn't be funny, and we're all laughing at "cancer bridezilla" --- however, the attention it would inevitably attract is going to include a lot of people saying how callous you are etc. Though black humor is a recognized way of dealing with pain, it's not as socially acceptable in the US as it is elsewhere (there's this mealy-mouthed-ness around illness and mortality).

Maybe interviewing people who have had cancer and observed other patients doing this, as well as caregivers who have been ridden over by these manipulative types, would be the way to go? And to soften it a bit, a historical perspective on invalidism (I'm thinking Victoriana) as the province of the privileged and the modern manifestation being a problem of runaway privilege in every possible way, might work?

Alternatively, you could write out a quick piece, a bit longer than your above entry, on what your reactions were listening to the unnamed guy whining on and on on the radio, and your empathy with the people around him being abused for being unable to read his mind. Illness/cancer doesn't make you a saint, it just burns off things that are less essentially you.

Maybe HuffPo if Salon didn't want it.

[rinue]

Interesting observation about invalid chic, particularly from wasting diseases, and its roots in the Victorian era. It is definitely an assertion of either wealth or spiritual advancement, depending. I did a lot of reading not too long ago about the history and psychology of hunger strikers and fasting in Western culture, where it seems to be in the background of a lot of saints and also is used by prisoners who believe they are wrongfully imprisoned - an assertion of being more than human, more than an animal.

And with it there's this fetishization of the wasting body, which you see in a lot of representations of saints (and Jesus on the cross, even though there's no reason to think he wouldn't have been well fed up to that point; rather the opposite) and also of superior aliens (the greys). And I think that imagery found its way into heroin-glamour and also the idea of the beautiful invalid, as seen in La Boheme and Rent.

I imagine part of it comes from wanting to retain a sense of oneself as not disgusting, or as eternal and more than the disease, but it also can parallel the thinking of some of the more strident vegans and raw foodists I have met, who seem to want to place themselves above other humans and outside nature, sort of as god-beings. It's that kind of righteous self-absorption I see here.

[movingfinger]

Florence Nightingale is the textbook example of someone who used illness to great advantage.