Orangutans

I wrote a short note to my wife the other day. Ex-wife, that is. Well, we’re still married, but you know what I mean. She is about to take a trip to Kalimantan with her boyfriend and other friends, where they will boat into the jungle to see orangutans.

I wrote: Have fun on your trip. Be careful. This would be way too much for me. I’m sorry.

She wrote back and asked what I was sorry about. What would be too much?

I explained that I am sorry that I have become so unable.

This is the first time, oddly enough, that it has occurred to me to feel “sad” about what has happened to my health. I’ve always been pretty stoic about it, just facing things the way they are. And yet, as I have become steadily more unable, I guess I’ve reached a sort of tipping point between feeling a little bit ‘challenged’ and actually ‘unable’; between feeling that I’m having a bad day health-wise and feeling that every day is a bad day.  

I see on my Facebook page one of these reminders from times past. Just two years ago, we were in Singaraja for a day-long snorkeling/water sports trip--and I see a stranger. Where has the person who could do these things gone?  There I am, swimming tirelessly in the open sea. There I am underwater in a diving suit. But this is no longer I. It is he—he who came to the tropics seven years ago full of a spirit of adventure, ready to explore, to trek, to swim, to dive, to tour foreign cities, to climb the stairs of Buddhist temples, to drink in the nightlife in Bangkok and Singapore.

I’m not so much ‘sorry’ for myself, really. I’m sorry in a more general sort of way—sorry that I have become other than I anticipated being, sorry for the nonnegotiable ‘reality’ of the thing, sorry that one cannot somehow overcome what he has been overcome by, sorry that I can no longer say “I can”, but must admit that “I cannot”. In some sense, my illness has removed “me” from participation in my fate; or, rather, has refashioned me according to the assignation of fate by disease.

It is not difficult for me to accept what simply is. After all, this fate rather painfully enlivens my person every day. It has simply, and rather suddenly, occurred to me that I might give myself leave to feel regret. I look back now on younger, healthier days with a mixture of keen nostalgia and something of awe, remembering a blithely able body, a nonchalant readiness to perform tasks and feats now quite beyond my reach.  

I suppose that one would state the typical moral at this point: that is, appreciate your health while you have it. Don’t take it for granted.

But the thing is, I did appreciate it. That’s why I miss it so much now.