Woes
It’s impressive how easily we sink into self-pity over the most picayune disruptions in our lives, tug of the wallow in woe and oh how the world has wronged me. It feels so good to nurse self-righteous wounds: that rude cashier, the broken machine, the sniffles, the bills, the chores, spilt milk…
But then I come across something like this, shaming me to put it all into perspective:
Three years before, my brother had said, “I’m buying a Hummer.”
We were in the basement, having a drink.
“I love them.”
His wife was recovering from necrotizing faciitis, otherwise known as flesh-eating disease. Her condition had been critical. Sean had spent the previous week by her hospital bed. The disease is usually fatal within twenty-four hours if undetected […]
Whether she would live had been a daily question; it seemed the most we could hope for was that the leg could be amputated. Her parents were staying in the house at the time. Her father held the opinion that the flesh-eating disease was visited upon his daughter as a consequence of Sean’s godlessness.
At that stage, Sean and his wife were also second-time parents – their baby was only weeks old. He wasn’t taking food. Days after Sean’s wife left the hospital, the baby had to undergo surgery to undo a narrowing of his duodenum. Sean spent the days worrying about his wife, and nights sleeping at the hospital in a chair next to his baby.
He stayed at home for a while one night during a moment of apparent calm. I took a whiskey down to his basement.
“I’m buying a Hummer,” he had said. “You can drop them from a plane.”
High Mobility in my brother’s Hummer, by Colin McAdam (Harper’s, April 06)
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Comment
- I thought “The Spirit of Disobedience” in that same issue was beautiful— how we choose to make our lives meaningful matters.
— matthew Apr 26, 7:44pm #
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