Who Cares: A Reflection on Healing Communities

WHO CARES: A REFLECTION ON HEALING COMMUNITIES MARILYN CHANDLER MCENTYRE* In his critique of the high-tech, low-touch medicine of the antibiotic age, Beyond the Magic Bullet, Bernard Dixon argues that "Medicine has two tasks: to comfort and to heal" [1, p.2]. He claims that overemphasis of specific etiology and a limited idea of cure undervalue the importance of comfort and the larger understanding of healing that many more traditional cultures preserve. If we accept a common distinction between healing and curing, we may recognize some truth in the idea that drugs, physical therapies , and surgical interventions may cure, but people heal. People heal in that their bodies autonomously recover from a wide variety of sicknesses. And people heal each other in various kinds of personal contact involved in caregiving and attendance upon the sick. In many traditional cultures, healing practices occur in community and involve recognized rituals in which participants understand their roles and share a belief in the efficacy of gathering around those who are sick, dying, or laboring in childbirth. Communities gather to keen and weep together in times of grief, to see children into the world, to usher their youngsters through painful rites of passage, to pray or dance their sorrows and needs before the gods. In contemporary American culture, firmly rooted in capitalistic individualism and personal freedom, traditional structures of community have tended to atrophy and be replaced by organizations constituted to meet specific needs. Some of these, like 12-step programs, support groups, and hospice associations, have been immensely successful in creating circles of healing where people authentically care for each other not only with professional expertise but by entering into the intimacy of shared pain and learning. Still, considerable confusion remains about what we may expect of family, friends, and faith communities in those times when we need healing or want to offer it. Even the ideal of "decent neighborliness" has become vexed with uncertainties. * Department of English, Westmont College, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108.© 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/97/4004-1029$01.00 64 Marilyn Chandler McEntyre ¦ A Reflection on Healing Communities I would like here to reflect on some recent stories that focus on four distinct kinds of healing communities that emerge in times of illness, how they function, how they intersect, and how they succeed or fail. I came to this topic from my own sometimes frustrated efforts to find time and means and appropriate ways to participate in caring for the sick people I know. In that process I have returned to such stories as these to help bring into focus some of the ways illness gathers us into community, reconfigures relationships , and calls us to reaffirm our responsibility to care for one another, though we may not always be quite sure how to do that. /. Family In Lynn Sharon Schwartz's 1984 story, "The Wrath-Bearing Tree," a young woman finds herself haunting the halls of the hospital where her father lies in his final illness, wondering how to behave appropriately to the occasion. As she smokes cigarettes in the waiting room and giggles at the wanderings of a dissociative old patient, she reflects on the difficulty of the enforced intimacies of these final days. She tells her father she'll stay with him, though he's assured her she doesn't have to. She reflects ruefully on their awkwardness with each other: This is the closest I have come to telling him I love him. Not very close. I long to tell him I love him and am sorry for his suffering, but am afraid he would consider that in bad taste. My father does not consider love or sorrow in bad taste, only, I imagine, talking about them. That he is dying is an evident obscenity that cannot be spoken. [2, p.6] The fact she points to is that most of us don't know how to see our loved ones through their final passage toward death. Death in the bosom of the family is neither so common nor so readily accommodated as it may once have been. The family itself, in modern...