On the other side of the curtain, the doctors were busy asking questions to what sounded like an old man. It was someone who just had a stroke and they were first hand checking at what extent his vital reasoning was affecting. What year are we in? Do you know when you were born? What was your profession? What´s your name? What day of the week are we in? Overwhelmed by the intensity and the frequency of the questions, the old man answers were becoming more and more insecure as the questioning advanced. He sounded lost and tired and who would not be after 1am in the morning, in a narrow hospital bed, surrounded by doctors whose presences were illuminated by the strong yellow lights. Please Gd, I told to myself, not that...pls...and then I remembered about my aunt Hannah who after a stroke that mountain of a woman was reduced to a mass covered by a white blanket in a bed surrounded by decaying body smells. And about a family friend, a very active woman with a sharp mind, who in just one a stroke of a minute turned into a wheelchair-bounded unhappy person.
It´s terrible to lose control of your mind.
Gabriele von Arnim latest successful book Das Leben ist ein vorübergehender Zustand - in my translation Life is a temporary condition - is a thoughtful memoir about the ten hard years spent taking care of her husband, journalist Martin Schulze. A journalist who lost the way with words, reduced to an articulation of a couple of words based on which Gabriele could guess what he meant.
I refuse to make comparisons and in any case, my bibliography about chronical illness and mourning includes two brilliant books: The Year of Magical Thinking (for unexpected death, sickness and mourning) and Sick (for living with chronic disease at a young age, a book that I´ve read with fear and interest where I was myself getting used with being diagnosed with a chronic disease). Definitely, you have to focus on your own emotions and feelings and frustrations when writing about such topics.
What surprised me in the book of Von Arnim is less the personal experiences of her ten years of witnessing the life struggle of her late husband, but the pressure to intellectually understand what is going on in such situations, the connection of her personal experience with other similar situations, her own story being relevant as part of a larger human story about ephemeral life and inexorable death.
´Wie lebt man in der Krankheit und blebt in der Welt?´ (´How one can exist within the sickness and still stay present in the world´, my amateurish translation from the original German) Indeed, how can we co-exist with the permanent deterioration of our life skills. Of our mind, who is the center of our existence, which organise the existence through words. Her detachment from her everyday reality and the refuge in upper worlds is not denial, but part of the struggle to survive. (´Ich will von der Schwere meines Schicksal nicht einmal etwas hören, will es nicht wissen´. - ´I don´t want to hear anything from the hardship of my destiny, I don´t want to know anything about it´). It´s the intellectual skill of permanent inquiry which she is using while recording in a diary her husband´s ten years of survival after the double stroke. She is registering and suffering for his suffering. Her own suffering is less important, she is existentially caught in the middle of the impossible situation that once he will be no more left a huge hole into her existence.
Every stage of the new life is observed with attention, inscribed in the diary and later made part of a book which is not only a tribute to her late husband suffering, but a tribute to a life that is not giving up the power of words as fully aware of how easy those words can fade away in the night of the brain. Just a stroke of a second and all is gone.
Rating: 5 stars
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