This past summer, I had major back surgery, experienced runaway post-operative pain, and arose nine days after returning home with pins and needles in my hands and feet. Four days later, I could no longer stand, and I was readmitted to hospital. Weakening precipitously, I mysteriously couldn’t lift my left arm above my shoulder, and had to be hauled on and off a bedside commode. No one knew what was wrong with me. After multiple MRIs confirmed that the back surgery had been flawless, the surgical team decided my infirmity was psychosomatic. I was discharged as insane. Weeks later, having been wasting away in a gruesome,
For me, however, illness and disability proved great levelers. Being smitten haphazardly from on high has been humbling. No longer possessing the strength to open my own coffee creamers induced a distinct sensation of anybody-ness. I could have been any body. I was keenly aware that it did not matter whether I was an underpaid telemarketer or a novelist with 17 books under her belt, even if I, too, hoped to write several more; the capricious corruptions of the cold three-dimensional world weren’t fazed by my CV. Lying in that hospital bed for weeks, ordering my usual miniature corn muffin for breakfast and remembering to ask for extra butters, I have never felt more completely just like everybody else.
Kureishi hints at the same revelation when he recounts posing the standard, “Why me?” and a friend responds, “Why not you?” Abstractly, there’s wisdom in why-not-me, but it’s no consolation. Conceding that you should be no less prey to the vicissitudes that afflict other people doesn’t make a dent in the impression of having been picked on.
Medical calamity is isolating. Even limping along the sidewalk from the nerve pain that necessitated my back surgery, I became mere street furniture to the public rushing past; I was no longer part of their fast, efficient, functional world. When cataclysm strikes, friends and family may be sympathetic, but there’s no getting around the fact that this happened to you; both parties sit on opposite sides of a very high fence. Maybe they love you, but they’re still glad this didn’t happen to them, and they should be glad. In fact, if there’s any lesson in this, it’s for the well, who are still candidates for the euphoria of hitting a sweet crosscourt forehand.
Lesson? Did I say lesson?
For writers like Kureishi and me, surely the least compensation we should expect for our travails is enlightenment. What did I learn, then, from going, in a fortnight, from a fit, capable woman with designs on becoming a SuperAger to a scrawny, shaky geriatric who can’t open the jaws of her own hair clip?
That I am mortal. That I may well predecease my husband, though he’s seven years my senior. That all my pleasures rely on complex biological systems I did not design, do not understand—much less control, and never think about unless they go awry. That facing a future in which I might never play tennis again moves me to tears. That I do not like pain. That I fancy being able to walk. That I hate hospitals, prize independence, and eventually get sick of miniature corn muffins.
I could go on, but you get the idea: I can derive nothing from this experience that wasn’t obvious to me beforehand. As a lifetime amateur athlete, I could have predicted at any age that being reduced to the strength of an amoeba would crush my morale and plunge me into an identity crisis. I bet Kureishi could also have assured us while still in rude health how shattered he’d be by becoming an instantaneous quadriplegic from a fall to the floor. Shattered itself is conspicuously short on comforting homilies that this jarring paradigm shift has taught him.
Perhaps Kureishi’s and my stories provide less a lesson than a reminder: that each of us is always a horrifying half step away from utter devastation. Mine is a reminder of how little protection even the most earnest physical diligence—our whole grains, our kettlebell drills—provides. Both sorry tales mirror what lurked in the back of my mind when cycling the hectic, unpredictable streets of New York and London. But that shadowy anxiety didn’t stop me from saddling up. I never visualized too clearly the moment of inattention that would turn me, too, into a quadriplegic, lest I summon the vision to life. In fact, it’s fascinating how seldom we heed the fear of being broadsided by the calamity hulking around every corner. Should we do so, we’d never leave the house. But then, Kureishi didn’t leave the house, and look where that got him. Why, if we routinely took precautions to avoid that author’s fate, we’d never sit in a chair without a seat belt.
If I do fully rejoin the ranks of the well, I ought to actively relish having sensation in my hands (I’m halfway there)—but I won’t. In five minutes, I’ll take for granted that I can distinguish my husband’s warm, lightly haired arm from a banister. Just as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you is unlikely to inspire fatuous jubilation over being, technically, still alive, it’s unnatural to be unrelentingly grateful for the simple luxuries of recuperation: popping to the kitchen for a cheese cracker without imposing on someone else, launching out the door of your own accord, and striding painlessly down a city street. The emotional exercise of Thanksgiving all year round would rapidly grow forced and posturing, reminiscent of the self-conscious, theatrical joyfulness of Kamala Harris.
Besides, unremitting gratitude also implies unremitting anxiety: that at any single moment, wham, everything for which we’re so ostentatiously grateful can be taken away. Who wants to live with that underlying terror? To the degree that Kureishi’s memoir does have lessons, we will not and cannot learn them. We can only negotiate this perilous world in a state of heedlessness. Maybe it’s that very heedlessness that Kureishi most misses.
Some things happen that have nothing good about them. Visitors repeatedly assured me that the melting of my musculature would provide loads of “material” for future novels. This bright-siding was well intended, but I personally would have zero interest in reading a novel about some inert, bedridden blob with GBS. I’d rather read Microsoft’s terms and conditions. I don’t believe I’ve benefited in the slightest from liquifying into a jellyfish. Regaining my strength has been slow, boring, and unedifying. If I’m better informed about my own fragility, I’d happily have continued to suffer from delusions of durability. If I’m humbled, I’d have preferred to preserve my hubris.
There was nothing good about Kureishi’s accident, either. Although he and I have had public differences over affirmative action in publishing (which I oppose), I fiercely rue that this happened to him. Shattered is good enough reading, and if it’s ineffably disappointing, that could be because the reader wants answers, or “lessons,” that are simply not on offer—not to Kureishi, not to me, and not to any other wretch who draws the short end of the medical stick. His account at least functions as a bracing rehearsal for the instant ruin that menaces us all. But even if this book were the finest work he’s ever written? Kureishi would surely trade his memoir in a heartbeat for the ability to walk to a newsagent.
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