Country folk singer John Prine wrote songs for the heartbroken. He died of COVID-19 a year ago and for the first time in years I tried again to explain what broke me. It’s not been easy to write because I am very ill and the subject is illness and illness is vast.
This essay is about what it means to be sick, not with the sort of illness that usually gets airplay, the sort that defines a part of your life in ways you ultimately learn to manage and work around, but with the sort that renders it utterly unrecognizable. We don’t make much space for narratives about this kind of illness. Perhaps because it’s less scary to think of illness as either treatable or terminal than it is to acknowledge that it sometimes leaves people horrifically disabled for the rest of their lives. Whatever the reason, we should make more space. Because it is terribly hard to learn how to be that sick when neither you nor those you rely on for support understand what it means to be so. Certainly it was for me.
