Misery Finds Us All At Some Point
That’s the only thing I’m learning from adulthood.
One of my uncle’s friends is dying of terminal cancer.
About a year ago, the doctors gave him eighteen months — if that — before the cancer would slowly make him lose himself to immobility, pain, and hollowness.
That’s not the most devastating thing about this man’s story, though.
Five years ago, this man’s wife suffered two debilitating strokes that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body. Physical therapy could do only so much. The wife had to quit her job and give up driving, and the losses of her independence made her a shell of herself. She also refused to have any caregivers come in to help her with daily tasks, so the brunt of care has come from her husband on his own.
Again, that’s only a piece of the whole story.
Ever since this tragic turnaround, the wife berates her husband every single day. She’s said some awful things — ranging from wanting to see him die to calling him every derogatory term in the book — but he still attends to her needs of food, cleanliness, and care.
Did I mention they’re both alcoholics? I know, this story doesn’t seem like it can get much worse.
From the outside looking in, I see their misery and how they make each other more miserable by association. But somehow it’s too late. They’ve both lived their lives, they made their choices, and now they have to ride out the fortune — or, in this case, misfortune — of the cards they’ve been dealt.
I wish there were some happy spin to this, but I can’t find one. If I were back in my old Baptist upbringing, someone might tell me that these people made their own misery by not following God’s path for their lives. But, if that’s the case, at what point did they deviate from the road? What did they do so wrong that they suffer so much in the here and now?
Then there’s that old adage: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But I just don’t see it. It’s easy to say that kind of thing when you’re not living that life of unspoken doom and dread.
There are bigger problems in the world — everything from climate disasters to human rights being violated or…
