Sue Wootton
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship.” Susan Sontag.
The idea that health and illness are different states, sometimes to the point of being completely different territories or countries has proved to be an enduring and powerful metaphor. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her 1930 essay “On Being Ill”, wrote of the distance between the worlds of the well and the ill, and of how different those two worlds feel to their inhabitants. She described the ‘daylight’ quality of health, which is a place of community, purpose, business and busy-ness. But, she noted, in the same way that daylight obliterates the ever-present skyful of stars, so when “the lights of health go down” the “undiscovered countries” of illness are revealed. We all have another homeland, that strange and disconnected place where nothing seems to go to plan:
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag.
After almost thirty years as a doctor, I have started writing fiction. I have recently completed a collection of short stories called Admissions which includes tales of eight different women working in the same crumbling public hospital in the far south of Aotearoa. Sounds familiar? For those of us who have worked at the coal-face of clinical medicine, my stories may not surprise or shock, but I hope they are tales of our common humanity and shared experiences. Perhaps this is the main reason I write: I want to tell stories which unite us.
Loss is like a current. Like fish, we respond with instinctive movement, ending up where we’re going but not, perhaps, where we intended. For some writers, the waterfall propulsion of grief channels, over time, into extraordinary work. Here are some books eloquent on loss, but greater than that, they reveal nature, character and a profound sense of being in the world, being part of it.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, Russia and entered medical school in Moscow aged nineteen. While he was training as a doctor, he wrote humorous articles for weekly journals so that he could help financially support his parents and younger siblings. Increasingly he was drawn to writing serious drama and fiction. He is renowned as a master short story writer and playwright, whose fiction and drama explored the complexities of character and the often hidden depths of meaning in life. Chekhov practised as a medical doctor throughout his life, dying from tuberculosis aged 44.