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— chapter iii — Plot: The Disrupted Life The body of the cripple was patched and blistered, and so was the story he would tell. —Leonard Kriegel, Falling into Life Most of us have no idea what to say when someone is seriously ill, so we resort to platitudes: “I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet in no time” or “Just think about next summer when you will be playing tennis again.” Often we tell stories about our friends who also suffered devastating illnesses or injuries but who are now doing just ‹ne, better than expected, in fact, better than ever. These platitudes encapsulate the plot of the triumph narrative—that suffering will result in future recovery and a return to normal life. We have trouble —or resist—imagining a future in which our friend or relative might die or will live with a damaged body, loss of function, and a changed life. Yet this is actually the future for many who are ill. As discussed in the last chapter, those dealing with serious illness or accident ‹nd that their internal sense of self is damaged. It is equally true that their sense of self over time is disrupted. In this chapter I will consider the descriptions by writers of how illness or accident changes their sense of who they are as compared to who they were before. Despite assurances from family and friends that they will return to being the person they were before, they often ‹nd they do not. They instead must acknowledge the dif‹culty of accepting and living with a radically changed sense of self. It is striking to note, when reading illness narratives, how often writers refer to old and new selves as a way to depict how radically the self has been changed. Some mark this radical change by describing in detail the catastrophic event that heralded it—the diagnosis, the / 57 / accident, or the surgery. Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of the magazine Elle in France, wrote The Diving Bell and the Butter›y to describe his life after a massive stroke left his body paralyzed except for one eye. He devised a system whereby he would have a person read the alphabet to him and he would blink his eye to indicate the letter he wanted to use. He opens his book with this statement: “No need to wonder very long where I am, or to recall that the life I once knew was snuffed out Friday, the eighth of December, last year.”1 John Diamond in Because Cowards Get Cancer Too describes in detail the night before his surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his tongue. He and his wife have dinner, walk along the Thames, and chat about everything except the operation. He writes, “We drove home and lay together in our bed for what was to be the last time as the couple we had been for eight years. Tomorrow I would become somebody else.”2 Randy Shilts, in And the Band Played On, describes the AIDS epidemic as the event that split in two not only individual lives but the life of the gay community. “Before. It was to be the word that would de‹ne the permanent demarcation in the lives of millions of Americans, particularly those citizens of the United States who were gay.” Shilts goes on: “The epidemic would cleave lives in two. . . . Before meant innocence . . . this was the time before death.”3 How radical the break between the old and new self is generally re›ects the severity and duration of injury or loss of function. Some people initially deny their loss but come to reconcile their experience before and after illness or injury; some try to envision a way to live with multiple experiences of the self, that is, to embrace the new self while also reclaiming or living with the memory of parts of the former self; and ‹nally, some insist the breach between old and new self is absolute and that the sufferer should abandon any hope of returning to his or her previous life. Yet, in fact, even these people retain some connection to who they were in the past. Insofar as the story of illness is the story of the self, this radical change in the self over time becomes a central theme in many narratives and gives rise to an important paradox. Traditionally autobiographical writing assumes a stable self to be represented in writing through...

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