Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope | Richard M. Cohen

book: Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope | Richard M. Cohen

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Strong at the Brok...

	Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope Richard M. Cohen Harper, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Welcome to your future

I won't lie to you. This is a hard book to read. Oh, it's not because of Richard Cohen's writing. His style is as graceful, conversational, and flowing as readers of his earlier Blindsided came to expect. And it's not because the subject matter of the book--coping with chronic illness--isn't both intrinsically interesting and relevant to our own lives. In a day when medical science keeps us alive longer and longer, many of us who are now healthy are likely to be looking at chronic illness down the road. 90 million Americans already endure chronic illness.

And that's what makes this book a difficult read. It's too relevant. As Cohen says, "welcome to your future."

Cohen, himself one of the chronically ill (MS and cancer survivor), profiles five people who cope with chronic illnesses. Two are kids, three are middle aged adults. The illnesses are ALS, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, MS, Crohn's Disease, and bi-polar disease. Through extensive interviews with these people, as well as his own personal experience, Cohen explores the entirely new world we're thrown into when chronic illness strikes us. It's a world none of us are prepared for, and we have to grope our way toward answers to the new set of questions that confront us. How to deal with the ensuing anger? the panic? the loss of control? How to realistically acknowledge one's condition without allowing it to absorb one's whole being? How to deny in a fruitful way? How to cope with the healthy world, whose members are indifferent, terrified by, or clueless when it comes to chronic illness?

Doubtlessly each reader will be especially moved, because of his or her personal circumstances, by one of the five chronically ill folks profiled by Cohen. Denise, the ALS sufferer, particularly speaks to me. A dear friend of mine died of ALS. So did my wife's father. In reading Denise's sometimes panicky, always smoldering, efforts to cope with a disease that inevitably destroys the body while leaving the mind intact, the brutality of my friend's ordeal came rushing back to me: his conviction that ALS had ruined his life without teaching him any great life lessons, his feeling of being cheated, his almost unspeakable terror at the thought of "lockdown" (the state in which the ALS has progressed to total paralysis and the patient's consciousness is "locked" into an immobile body), his despair at the steady loss of self-reliance.

Still, there is hope in this book, although it's a hope that's sober and realistic. The people profiled here know that their diseases are incurable. Three and probably four of them will die of their chronic disease. Yet each of them struggles to live while they can. They struggle for self-control, to be brave for others, to make some kind of future for themselves, and to learn what can be learned from their growing dependence on others, their heightened sense of the fragility of life, their increased appreciation for the little things that they once took for granted.

But Cohen never sentimentalizes their (or his) struggle. This is the real deal, not Hollywood stuff. Resilience goes lax, patience is frayed, tortured bodies and splintered emotions get worn out. As Cohen says (and in doing so speaks for all the folks he profiles), "I awaken each day and hate being a sick person." And yet, like Sisyphus, he and millions of other chronically ill people nonetheless go on. In the final analysis, it's the going on, the affirmation of life despite everything, that infuses hope--although not victory--into this story.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5

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