After Illness

The thing is, there's no way around it. Even though we plan our lives to completely evade it as much as possible, we can't.

No matter how much money we try and insulate ourselves with, bam! It's there like mud after rain.

No matter how many packets of Vitamin C powdery-fizzy goodness we mix into our waters, or how many super-healthy-eating cookbooks and fitness guides we buy with titles like Become a Super Human Android in Five Easy Steps While Eating Only Chocolate Only Through Your Nose, it's there.

It is.

No matter, either, if we stayed inside, never got wet, never touched another human being even. It's still there. We're going to get it.

Illness. Colds. Flu. Diarrhea. Vomiting. The whole gamut.

I started to come to peace with this reality when I began teaching seventh graders. I caught everything they had--and man, they had it all. It seemed every week I was coming home with a new variation on the age-old cold.

Now that I am a home-dad, it seems playgroups and playdates in York, England carry those determined bacteria just as confidently as do public schools in New England.

Tyler has just fought off his third bout with something. Jen and I have stopped trying to label each successive cold. Instead, we've tried to love him through it, help him see that it will pass, put vapor rub under his chin, hold him through the coughing fits, and let him watch as many movies as he wants.

(Meanwhile, we steel ourselves for the undeniable fact: we're next.)

But the thing about realizing that we're all going to get sick is this: after illness comes health. Most mornings, we wake up and start our days. But after illness we wake up and feel like high-fiving the post carrier, doing a flip down the stairs, and eating our bowls of cereal while singing the Hallelujah chorus through every bite--milk spraying, Cheerios flying free.

We get better. Colds leave. Flu hitchhikes out of town. Fevers drop. Coughing stops. Vomiting ceases. Diarrhea slows. It passes.

During my most recent battle with a vomiting-inducing-cold of some strain or other, I sat on the bathroom floor, clutching my stomach with one hand, the toilet with the other. Preparing to retch for the 11th time in two hours (no hyperbole, really).

Tyler was asleep, and Jen was there with me for moral support. (It hadn't yet made the leap to my lovely wife.) I looked up at Jen when there was a break in the vomiting traffic. "I can't do this anymore."  Then I took a breath, and then I vomited again.

Jen's reply was as true as true as true: "Yes, you can babe. It's going to pass. I know it's awful, but it will stop and you'll feel better."

And that's the thing. It stops. The better comes.

None of us like to vomit or feel like our heads are exploding or like someone is gleefully sticking their fingers up into our nostrils and poking around trying to find the valve marked MUCUS RELEASE! But we all love the moments when it clears, when we can breathe, eat, laugh, feel what good is, again.

So I'm really only regurgitating here when I write that wisdom is all about--or at least a little about--finding a way to hold onto the it will end! during the it's hurting!

In our illnesses, yes, but also in our work, in our writing, in our relationships, in our wounds, in our confusions. No pain has the power to wield a full attack forever. It stops. Somehow, in some way, it gives up. And what remains are not the trails of bacteria and germs and messy clothes and broken relationships. No. What remains is the way we've grown through the pain. The way we've learned just a little more about love.

The Winter Vomiting Virus

That's what the UK National Health Service is calling it.

And it lives up to every bit of its name.

First, it's definitely a cold, wintry virus--both literally and figuratively. Literally, because the virus was born amidst freezing temperatures and aloft huge mounds of fluffy white snow. Figuratively, because the virus is certainly cold-hearted, like a viper, or a python, or a rattlesnake, or another snake, or something else that has no warmth at all in its heart.

Second, I'm glad that the NHS lets us know right up front that it is a VOMITING virus--just in case we were confused about what this virus was going to do to our throats and tummies. Indeed! There will be vomiting galore! Vomiting everywhere!

The NHS was right about that one. Good call.

Thirdly, it's certainly a virus, in the most virusy sense of that word. It spreads. It leaps tall buildings in a single bound. It jumps from person, to person, to person. (Just like a virus.)

Tyler came down with it first. Upchuck tally: five times, all in one session.

Then I caught the virus. Upchuck tally: twenty times, spread equally throughout five sessions.

Finally, Jennifer caught the virus. Upchuck tally: twenty-two times, spread throughout four sessions.

This Winter Vomiting Virus activity began in out little home on Lesley last Wednesday evening. Tyler had woken from his nap upset, and while I attempted to soothe him--rub his head, scratch his back, you know--he proceeded to deliver a massive waterfall all over me and his room.

I phoned Jen, who came rushing home from her office on campus. And here I will admit: Jennifer is calmer and better in a pickle than I am. In a pickle, I begin to wonder what in the heck to do: eat the pickle? Throw the pickle away somewhere? Or I ask, WHY DID THIS PICKLE HAVE TO COME FIND US TODAY!?

Jennifer, meanwhile, calmly assesses the situation, trusts that all will be well, and then carries on. (Indeed, she's a role model for me of Keep Calm and Carry On, the sign that now hangs on a wall as we descend our stairs.)

Tyler calmed down, the upchuck on his floor was sanitized, and we all eventually took a deep breath.

Until the next day, when I phoned Jen at her office again.

I felt the gurgling, you see.

In the tummy.

Jen came home yet again, and this time, she and Tyler stayed calm while I did some enormous spewing.

The next day, we all stayed home, in our pajamas, and watched massive amounts of Blue's Clues, Barney, Bob the Builder, The Fibbles, and Thomas the Tank Engine. For a family that watching basically nothing on the television, we all kind of collapsed and spent hours hanging off the couch singing ridiculous songs that would stay in my head late into the night as I was trying to fall asleep.

But before sleep that evening, yes, you guessed it: Jen felt the gurgling.

In the tummy.

Sparing the really icky, yucky, gooey, gassy details, we all made it to Monday morning.

As I type these words, Jen is at the office on campus.

Tyler is napping.

I am writing.

Monday morning never felt so dang glorious.

And the rub of it all is that making it through a tough virus like that--a cold-hearted virus--makes us realize that life isn't about perfection. It isn't about trying to live in such a way that nothing bad ever happens, no mistakes are ever made, or you never get sick.

Because, after all, let's face it: no matter what, you're going to get sick.

Even if you lived inside a bubble, hey, you're going to get mighty sick of that bubble, right?

There's no way to escape some vomiting in this lifetime (the literal vomiting, or the figurative kind). What we realize after our little dance with the cold-hearted snake is this: what matters is the way you learn to lean on one another, fortifying each other for the dreams and the journey ahead, reminding each other that nothing good ever happened without trial.

The difficulty of our pain and the height of our joy are both second to the way we love each other through either.