TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

brings with it certain advantages. The caregiver, meanwhile, accepts the importance of their acquired rank with a mixture of resignation and relief. Being a wife can be a heavy burden; being the wife of a sick person, however, encumbers one with a particular load, one that is a socially graceful, self-sacrificing purple. However, noonequestions the children. Or at least noone asked the eleven-year-old boy what it was like to pass through a wide and decrepit door into that prisonwhere the captive became king and illness justified so many indulgences. A large part of who I am, of what I have become during my adult life, began to be forged in 1982, that year when my innocence began to familiarize itself with a vocabulary that had so far remained forbidden.

I lost a lot of things an account 0f my father’s illness. Among them was the right to ignore death until later in life.

That premature anguish is something I have never forgiven my family for.

***

It tookme thirtyyears tounderstand howmy father’s illnessmade me sick. Sick with a fictitious illness, I mean. That addition, that qualifier, is what makes it so dramatic. That is because, apart fromduring some isolated episodes, I have been and still am a person in excellent health suffering from crippling psychosomatic conditions. My life’s global climate, its dominant metaphor, has been illness. Held hostage by the bad 117