I came back from the AWP national
conference (10,000 people) sick. Fever, sore throat, loss of voice, cough. And
it’s only gotten worse since I got home. So I am once more in that strange
miasma of illness.
Fever always gives me the oddest
dreams. Wandering through maze-like structures with people I hardly know—certainly
not well enough for them to show up in my dreams. Responsibilities for large
amorphous projects of which I didn’t know I was in charge. Grown children and
aging brothers and sister all little ones again, all at the same time and my
responsibility. Dead parents and grandparents alive and young as I never knew
some of them to be. Important insights and realizations that drift apart like
smoke in my hands as I wake.
Waking life isn’t much better. Muzzy
with medications and voiceless. The dog knows something is wrong and whines
around me, licking at my knees and hands. It doesn’t take long for the computer
to take my headache and neck pain to new heights, so work on that is limited.
Reading is the one occupation that doesn’t hurt or require more concentration
or motor skills than I have right now.
Always, reading has been my
salvation in times of illness, injury, and overwhelming pain. I turn to it
eagerly, knowing that I will step out of my aching skin and into someone else’s
for the duration of a good book. I remember a back injury so severe that even
morphine couldn’t touch the pain. One leg was paralyzed, and I was in a
wheelchair, waiting for emergency surgery with no guarantees that I’d be able
to walk again when it was finished. I couldn’t sit, walk, lie down, sleep.
Books (Janet Evanovich and C.J. Cherryh) got me through that period, waiting to
have my back surgically reconstructed. I’ve had pneumonia countless times in my
life, and that’s when I turn to Dame Agatha Christie, especially the Miss Marples
and Ariadne Olivers, and to Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy
Night, that gem of a novel with Oxford as its centerpiece.
Once when hospitalized and on lots
of IV medicines, I re-read David
Copperfield with such intensity that it felt as if I were living the story
at the same time that I was marveling at the beauties of Dickens’ prose. No
graduate literature seminar has ever given me that kind of rigorous grasp on a
book.
I have a towering To Be Read stack
of books, some of which I’m to review for various places. I set the review
copies aside. They need my everyday brain and not this gauzy thing I’m floating
on through these days of illness. Still, I’m starting to make a dent in the
others in the stack.
When people ask me what novels could
possibly be worth—why don’t I spend my life doing important things to help humankind?—I
remember a time of agony and send a little prayer of gratitude to comic mystery
writer Evanovich and fantasy/science fiction writer Cherryh for getting me
through overwhelming pain and fear and out the other side. I only hope my own
books will do the same for someone else in such pain and fear and trouble.
What about you? Are books your help
in times of illness and pain? Which ones do you turn to?
