Detours

Most of us want to lead a happy life. I know I do, which is why I write blog posts intended to be uplifting. But life sometimes forces us to make a Big Detour – if not a descent. Such has been my experience with my husband’s recent and serious illness.

Like Persephone wandering among the flowers of the fields of life, we may find ourselves suddenly seized against our will and dragged into the underworld. Illness is not just an affliction of the body to be cured with the right medications. Both the sick person and family go through a dark night of the soul. Our simple precepts for cultivating a positive outlook on life don’t seem applicable in this foreign terrain. Yet cross it we must.

In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “On Being Ill,” she says:
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices in lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise in temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

©2011 by Chickee Atalla, author
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