A Belated "Care" Posting

Healing Myself

by Cora Schenberg

My family and I had ample time to ponder bikur cholim this past year. For some six months, we played host to a woman who managed to contract mononucleosis at the tender age of 51.

It wasn’t easy—what mitzvah is? Try as we did to remind our charge that mono does go away and is not life-threatening, bad days found her irritable, depressed, even obsessed with her mortality. I felt I’d have been a more patient caregiver if I could have had the occasional break from my charge. However, this was impossible, since she and I are one and the same person.

I’m not one who believes God sends us tsurus in order to teach us, or that suffering of any kind is inherently a gift. However, I do believe that through the help of God and of our loved ones, we might find learning, and perhaps gifts, in anything life throws at us. In that spirit, I set out to learn what our tradition might teach us about living with an illness.

I found lots written on bikur cholim, but little, if anything, on how to live with one’s own illness, major or minor, temporary or chronic. This seemed understandable. Who among us would not rather take care of others in need, than deal with an ill, cranky self? So when I thought of looking after myself, it came with conditions: I’ll do it as long as I look after others first, as long as I do my part in the world, as long as I don’t get lazy and self-indulgent. Which is why, for the first months of my illness, I tried to will it away. I went to work, kept extra-curricular and family commitments, exercised.

The problem was, I now hated all those things. I only loved sleeping, or at most, lying in bed with a book or a movie on DVD. I felt frustrated with myself for my lack of energy, which in turn made me even more tired. By the end of the semester, I could barely stand up. Fortunately, the academic schedule comes with a good, long break. I spent the month of May on the couch, being little more than cat furniture.

That’s when I had time to ponder what our tradition might tell us about living with illness. I found that while God does not send an owner’s manual along with our bodies, much of our traditional texts send a clear message in favor of self-care.

Our daily prayers testify to the imperative to care for our bodies. Each morning, in the “Asher yatzar” prayer, we give thanks for our bodies’ proper functioning. In an online piece on “Healthy Perspectives,” Rabbi Berel Wein reminds us that the human body, “wondrous and complicated and exact as it is, … is also very fragile and delicate. Everything must work correctly for us to feel healthy and good.” The rabbi reminds us that even “the slightest nagging pain or even relatively minor discomfort affects our mood and our creativity and sense of worth.” I often thought of these words as I struggled with frustration and depression over not being able to do what I usually could, at having forgotten what it felt like to be healthy.

Following the “yatzar” prayer, we thank God for making us “bezalmo,” in God’s image. I asked myself how can we be like God, if God is incorporeal? Where does the body fit in? It occurred to me that without our bodies, it would not be possible to house the soul that God gave us. Our capacity for humility, compassion, discernment, wisdom and all the other soul traits we are commanded to cultivate, is possible only when we inhabit our bodies. This underscores the need to care for these houses of our being.

One more example of many: when the Chevra Kadisha prepares a body ritually for burial, it is traditional to praise the departed’s body in words from the Song of Solomon. We read, “Behold thou art fair,” “thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks,” “thy lips are like a thread of scarlet.” If we lavish such praise on a body wasted in death, does not the living body deserve the same, if not greater, love?

These teachings did not make me less cranky or more patient with my illness. However, they provided gentle encouragement when I decided to give my body, finally, the rest it needed. Rest, which led me toward healing – in a testimony to the innate intelligence of our bodies, what we crave is sometimes what we need most.

In caring for my body, I learned that healing is an active, not a passive, process. For the well person, an active day involves being physically occupied, not lying around. For the healing person, however, the opposite is often true. Only in rest is the body able to occupy itself with fixing what the illness has broken. I learned that when refusing the necessary rest, the energy that would have gone into my healing went into whatever activity I ordered my body to do. I had to accept the fact that this was an either/or situation: heal and rest, or push and delay healing.

I was reminded of the time my step-brother, Art Ritter, went through treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma. Always an active man, Art planned to work through his chemo therapy treatments. He soon realized this was not possible; he could not even concentrate on a book or a television show during these times. Rather than focus on what he could not do, Art sought out what he could. He discovered he could gain comfort from listening to music while lying down. Between chemo treatments, Art told us how Beethoven’s compositions occupied his mind and gave him emotional strength during these most trying weeks. Seven years later, Art walks and trains participants in annual marathons to raise money to combat leukemia and lymphoma. He can be active now because he gave his body the gift of healing then.

As to the lady with mono, God must have gotten tired of her nudging, for by July, she – I should say I – was healed. I no longer needed afternoon naps, could teach, study, write, daven, exercise. Swimming in our neighborhood pool with the sun streaming down, I felt as if a thousand-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I thanked God for the restoring of my health, for making the complex network that is my body function smoothly again, so it could glide, with moderate effort, through the miracle of light-infused water.