This Is It

It happened five days ago—to me it was today—that Gillian Mears died. Multiple sclerosis: nerves of the nervous system, progressive myelin protective sheaths around nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord, progressive plaques, lesions, scarring, distorted messages to the nerves of the brain and spinal cord, no cure, chronic, progressive and fuck all motor control, less and less and less until . . .

Varuna is cut off and tuned out from everywhere else. No television and though there's access to sketchy internet, I am here to write. Logging on is strictly for research: Jean-François Millet, Anton Mauve, painters who influenced my newfound obsession, Vincent Van Gogh. Facebook—time waster, tangent maker—especially must be eschewed, but it's where I would've learned about Gillian Mears on the day of her death, not five days later as I have now. When Bowie died, it was immediate. Friends from high school and university, friends from my old skydiving world, friends from the literary scene, immediately, each with their own style of ode to the man whose music soundtracked lives, but this one—the death of Gillian Mears—I imagine would've been remembered on a much, much smaller scale, and only by certain writers.

Why must I put this to scale? Death is death; tragic is tragic.

Foal's Bread slapped me upside the head and straightened out my relationship to the swirling of my Meniere's disease for the duration of the book. Mears's tired and tiresome legs became fodder for the plot of Roley Nancarrow descending into the loss of his own. He didn't have MS, but he didn't need to for me to feel his pain, Gillian Mears's pain, and recognize my own. I read it for my book club. Some thought it sappy. Others loved it. I thought it a brilliant example of an illness narrative. Not all illness narratives have to sow the "I" and reap responsibility. Some prefer to gender swap.

When Foal's Bread came out, I was doing just that by writing Graham Smith, my sexagenarian obituarist who suffers from Meniere's disease. Pursuing Love and Death turned out to be my first published novel and, though I hadn't thought of it as such at the time, my first illness narrative. That's where all of this began. And now I'm here, thinking about her essay "Alive in Ant and Bee," how she lived on her own in the bush inside of an old ambulance even though her MS was a fiend. I wonder what triggered the switch, the need to spend her waning days with earth and body and the beautiful filth the two might make when slammed and meshed together. I wonder if it was acceptance or denial that pushed her toward such a crackpot idea?

Crackpot. Cracked body. Cracked days.

For me, illness among nature will never work. For me, it is the home with the family and the bed that I crave.

_________

I have a serious hang-up, think it's my ethnic duty to slam-dunk that American dream, work hard, make money, amass material, and judge yourself successful when your bank account dings five times: you've won the prize. Once I'd climbed the casual ladder to full-time contract, then onto proper employment with tenure, working in academia would be lucrative, right? I also suffer from Imposture Syndrome, which in my case is part insecurity, part age fixation (I look young; I spent the last years of my thirties telling people I was forty, "well, almost"; I think my peers deem me inexperienced and naïve). Working in academia would mean I was intellectually hip, and I very much want to be taken seriously. The alternative to teaching literature and creative writing at university was becoming a full-time writer, but how much can a writer amass? A Google-able name. Shelves of books you'll never be able to read before you die but not to worry because they make the most gorgeous and dedicated wallpaper a person could ever hope for.

When...