My mother visited me once while I was ill. I didn’t want her to come, but she did anyway. My father convinced me to make my way downstairs, and I sat across from her on a couch in his living room, struggling slightly to stay upright. She told me I looked gruesome. She complained about her trials with arthritis, described the pain in her heels and her back. She had emailed everyone she knew about my condition and told them she and my father were doing everything they could to care for me. She asked them to pray for me. I wondered if she had put my name in the church bulletin, but I decided not to ask; it didn’t seem like any of my business.
When she left, and I was able to retreat to my darkened, quiet room, I decided that my suffering had not yet made me a more understanding or compassionate person. But it had made me a more silent one, and I figured I would count that as a step in the right direction.
*
It has been years now since SJS took my life and body apart. I reassembled it slowly and carefully over the winter, noting milestones: the first day I ate only solid foods, the time I looked in the mirror and saw that that last scab had peeled from my lips. I ran my fingertips along them, luxuriating in the knowledge that my hand would come away without trailing wet scraps of flesh.
Now it is easy, unbelievably easy, to forget what happened. It’s hard to continue to be grateful for every successful swallow, or remember a time when blood was all I could taste. What will I lose if I do forget? Can I really gain anything by making myself remember?
They say a recurrence would be worse. And that the only way to avoid a recurrence is to not get pneumonia. Perhaps I should be more cautious. Surely it would be wise to avoid anyone whose cough sounds clotted, take more vitamins, dedicate more time to exercise. But until the COVID-19 pandemic came, I continued to take the subway to work, share drinks, hug friends, eat the rest of someone’s dessert if they weren’t going to finish it. I didn’t want to pay the costs of living with more reserve, didn’t want to tiptoe through my life.
The only physical reminder SJS has left me is the scar tissue that ripples the inside of my cheeks. I forget about it sometimes, but then my tongue will encounter an uneven pocket in the flesh of my cheek, or my lower lip will start bleeding. Just a little. Just enough to bring back blurred memories of drawn blinds and warm washcloths and a British voice reminding me to be patient while proofing my dough.
I measure out my flour a little more carefully, think about the temperature of my butter. Because I thought she’d like it, I bought Jo Ann a gift certificate for a facial; when I call my dad’s house, I talk to her on the phone, sometimes for more than fifteen minutes. I find myself referring to her and my father as my “parents,” something my teenage self would not hesitate to hang me for. On Mother’s Day, I think about getting her a card, although I never have.