A brutally honest reflection on being the sick spouse
Okay, so I’m not a fan of Lena Dunham and how you feel about her isn’t really relevant. For whatever reason I was reading a profile of her to lull myself to sleep (I make strange life choices). I try not to think about caregiving so I can turn my brain off, but it’s everywhere.
Not knowing anything about her, other than her status as controversial celebrity, I didn’t realize she is chronically ill. So I didn’t expect so much of the article to be about how her illness influenced her long-term romantic relationship.
“Our relationship probably lasted longer than it should have,” Dunham says. “He’s a very loyal person, so he was not going to bail when the going got tough. He literally held my hand while I got an enema on New Year’s Eve while his family celebrated. But when you’re sick, so much energy goes into making sure the other person is well that you’re not even noticing maybe our schedules aren’t compatible. Maybe we want different things out of our lives. Maybe we have different attitudes about what family means. Maybe these essential questions that people have to ask themselves all the time are not being asked, because we just want to make sure that I don’t pass out at the grocery store.”
In talking about the end of a friendship, she says:
“Maybe my illness made me impossible to be close to, maybe my fame made me impossible to be close to … I’ll work that stuff out in the future, but I was not operating in healthy relationship to the people closest to me.”
When someone is sick, we accept so much less of them.
It makes me wonder when that accepting less, letting things slide, in a way lets them slide away from us.
Sometimes we accept things that aren’t acceptable or overlook major issues because the illness seems so much more urgent.
How many relationships are unhappy not because of the strains of caregiving, but because they only remain because someone needs to be taken care of?
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I’m also not a fan of Ursula LeGuin, but I thought these excerpts of her writing on suffering were beautiful and profound. I once dropped out of a book club because I hate sci-fi, but maybe I should give it another chance?
PS. If you read the Lena Dunham article (which, lbh, you can skip) let me just note that I laughed for a very long time at the use of the phrase ‘intimate high-five.’ Wow.