The (im)patient

It was only after her death - I was thirteen at the time - that I realised. My Nana was one of the most interesting people I’ve known.

She had three of my favourite qualities: intellectual curiosity, a moral compass, and the occasional urge to wind people up for shits and giggles. Evangelist doorknockers would come to her Invercargill granny flat. A soft target, housebound and frail, she’d politely agree to take a pamphlet. When her visitors returned days later, expecting to seal the deal, she’d have read the pamphlet - every single word - and she’d hand them their arses. After all, if there’s only ten thousand places in your version of heaven, it’s probably full already. It’s just maths, isn’t it? No point trying. Might as well sin like the clappers!

To be fair, there wasn’t much sinning for Nana: she was both too Catholic and too arthritic. She had lost her husband, her great love, when I was in her daughter’s womb, and from that time had mostly lived alone. She’d been ill before then, for many years, and sometimes bedridden; but by the time I arrived, her arthritis was relentless and debilitating. I only recall her leaving her little house to go to the hospital. The things that sustained her - meals on wheels, her caregivers, and the eucharist - were brought to her in her home.

Maybe I’ve written about Nana before. Honestly, I can’t remember. I’ve had COVID; am still relearning how to think straight. It's a little over six weeks since the day my symptoms appeared.

I have not been housebound, or not exactly, even though for a month I barely left home, and for much of that first fortnight, hardly left my bed. I’ve been thinking about my Nana. When she became ill, she had to give up her career. She had been a pediatric nurse; apparently a gifted one. Although she could not work for much of her life, she read and thought prolifically about her profession, in her rocking chair by the heater. Nursing remained her vocation. She used that word, vocation, deliberately, and in both its senses: as her once occupation, and as a deep calling that came from her faith. The calling didn't stop because her body couldn’t answer.

Six weeks. In the first two, I couldn’t care less. I slept - or I propped myself up in bed, doing so little I might as well have been sleeping. When I could, I hauled myself out from under the duvet, took a shower. I still can’t write as much as I want, or think as nimbly, when I’m tired: I feel a creeping guilt every day I cannot post for you here. But if my mind is sluggish sometimes, my body frustrates me more. I’ve been intolerant of myself, sometimes angry, when I couldn’t run or lift - not just deprived of the things that bring me joy, but somehow thwarted or cheated.

If I’m blunt, this is some stupid shit. And I’ll tell you why. I’ve had time to think about it, at the back of my gym class - catching my breath over my barbell, hoping no one sees me skip a rep. Let me take a detour.

My oldest kid is nearly twenty-one. The pregnancy was hard: the birth was harder. I didn’t ‘bounce back’, like those admired women do, either in mind or body. And I didn’t know myself; this person who struggled for a time to stem the bleeding from one part of her, mop up the leaking milk from another, move any of her post-caesarean body off the knackered couch. I was figuring out how to inhabit this new me. I was also underemployed, and a little lost - not so much older than my first kid now. I decided that, after a lacklustre first attempt, I’d go back to university. I enrolled in gender studies. I took my son to lectures. He smiled over my baby-sick-stained shoulder, at the people in the row behind me.

In that class - its poky desks, scuffed lino and fluorescent lights - I felt the pleasure you only feel when your mental world gets turned upside down. Amongst the things I remember learning was this: an introduction to Descartes’ mind-body dualism. I know, that shit sounds fancy. Bear with me.

A few centuries back, there was this philosopher called René Descartes. He had an idea, that the mind and the body are made of fundamentally different stuff. (I’m paraphrasing him so badly that both his mind and body will be turning in his grave.) Out of Descartes’ thinking came this belief that our minds are superior to our bodies. Our bodies mostly have the job of carrying our superior minds around - almost like the body is a crane, and the mind is the crane operator. That thinking turned into a hierarchy. ‘Good’ bodies do what they’re told without a fuss, don’t ask much of the people who own them, or anyone else. Bodies that don’t just follow the instructions of the crane operator - aren’t easy to control or able to care for themselves - are somehow less.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. Lactating or menstruating bodies? Weird. All over the place. Can’t trust them. Bodies of people of colour? Also a problem. In Descartes’ colonial times, people of colour were thought to be controlled by their bodies - promiscuous, warlike, driven by crude passions - because their minds weren’t strong enough. They needed white folks to do the thinking for them, colonisers believed.

And people with disabilities? Well, if you believe the control of your body reflects the strength of your mind, and the strength of your mind is the core of your humanity, you can see where this kind of thinking leads. It stigmatises bodies that need care or support, even just kindness or understanding. It calls them ‘dependent’.

I have realised this last while, flagging over my weights, that even though I knew it was wrong, I’ve thought of my body in this weird, anachronistic way: as a tool, a machine, a thing to be mastered. I suppose I prided myself on that ‘mastery’. I suppose I’ve felt bruised by the loss of it.

Like I said, that’s some stupid shit. But if I’m honest, if we all are, a lot of us think this stuff, buy into this hierarchy, without even knowing. For a time during this pandemic, we cared for all our Aotearoa whānau, those who are disabled, immunocompromised, sick - for as long as their problems were also ours, and we could feel afraid together. Now that COVID is survivable for most of us, we’ve left the rest behind. We’re back to normal now. ‘Normal’ is the hierarchy, some bodies valued more than others; more deserving of a good life, or any life at all. Those less valued bodies die, every single day, counted blandly in a press release we no longer read. Normal. After all, masks can be uncomfortable, and let’s be even more honest: we never thought all lives were equal anyway.

I am OK, or I will be. I have had to renegotiate my relationship with my body. I wake some mornings to find it energetic, almost - until it is no longer. Other mornings, I wake up without even that illusion. I do my best. I catch my breath, lie down for a little if I need to. I try to withhold self-judgement, give myself care - because the care of self is like any other kind. It doesn’t work when it’s given grudgingly.

I started out this piece telling you about my Nana. Our tupuna can teach us in unexpected moments and unexpected ways. Sometimes I wonder what she’d make of this time, with her pragmatic science, her sleeves-rolled-up ethics. With her giving a shit, profoundly, about other human beings, though in not so many words.

And she answers me, not in so many words, but with a memory.

Towards the end, she was ‘dependent’. Going to the toilet, taking a shower, were things she could not do alone. A caregiver came to her house, usually female, sometimes male. For many, the very idea of this - the intimacy of the care Nana needed - would be mortifying, difficult to bear.

But Nana? She wouldn’t hear of it. She knew her body and mind - for all they could do, for all they couldn’t - had dignity, were precious, because she was a human being. And she had no business second-guessing what God told her was precious, any more than she had the right to withhold from that same body the care it needed. There was no ‘dependency’, no more or less, no better or worse. There was only humanity, our responsibility to it. She let a man help her, naked and small and wholly unbowed, strong in ways I want to be, into her bath.

I may not share her faith, or not the way she felt it, but Nana knew. We are all the same, not despite our vulnerability, but because of it. And rest assured, we are all vulnerable, every one of us, no matter our bodies. It just takes humility and courage to know it.