Sickness is Normal
On our need for tissues, OTC medicine, and Jesus
It's that time of year where sickness is ubiquitous. In our house, we've gone through six big tissue boxes in three weeks, and maybe more. I can’t count how many over-the-counter cough and cold medication bottles we’ve emptied. Our eyes have been running and streaming; our noses the same (the less said about that, the better). And the coughing, coughing, coughing, has been relentless.
In general, those of us living in first world countries have become used to a level of physical health that others around the world, and certainly our ancestors, would find astonishing. And because “good” health—that is, our abilities that allow us to basically do what we easily want most of the time—has become our default, we live with an inverse understanding of ill health. That is, we tend to think of sickness as a kind of outlier of our daily expectations. Therefore, we experience any check on our bodily capabilities as bad and, tellingly, unusual. In essence, any illness feels foreign. And foreign things feel strange and often scary.
I wish I could say that prior to 2020, this mentality wasn’t normal. But for at least a decade, many of us have lived with a fear of sickness that borders on hypochondria. And of course, COVID-19 accelerated this trend. Suddenly, we were all sweating—pardon the pun—over every fever, every stray cough, every post-nasal drip. The unconscious understanding of sickness as something out of the ordinary became astronomically heightened. With the ubiquity of this disease—in our conversations, in the media, in all the signs about staying six feet apart and the mask mandates at the least—came the relentless reminder that ill health is a threat to us. It is something for us to fear. For when our bodies are sick, we can’t escape the truth: we are fallible and weak, and our bodies can and will slowly fail.
It bears mentioning that those of you with chronic illness or pain, or those who are aging, know these things already. Your daily struggles to breathe or move or do any number of actions are a constant presence in your lives. Many of you don’t even discuss it for a few reasons, one of which is certainly that the rest of us don’t really want to hear about how ill health dominates your lives. Another reason is that many of you know that what you live with is, well, your normal. Please forgive our hyperventilating over illness, particularly COVID-19, in the last few years that subsumed our conversations. We are like children, only noticing things when they affect us directly, and you deal with this all the time.
And why are any of us surprised when we get sick, really? The fluctuations of health and weather are always topics of small talk between people. If nothing else, this should show us how attuned we are to uncontrollable challenges to our bodies, be they from microscopic germs or inescapable storms. The common cold, that tenacious bug that’s been visiting us for weeks, is called common because, well, it is. Our family doctor explained to us last fall that, unfortunately, the average amount of time we spend coughing after an upper respiratory illness is at least three weeks. For the mathematically challenged, that’s at least twenty-one days. And that’s the default, the normal, time range for a lingering cough.
So being sick actually isn’t unusual for us mortals. I can ignore this fact, and therefore when the chest congestion and headaches hit me, I can complain about it and moan about how I don't feel well, and I usually do enough of that. But in the whole scheme of things, a cold is not actually that difficult to live with. I tell people it's annoying to have a runny nose and a cough that flares up for weeks. While I won’t and can’t ignore it—I do have an obligation to care for my body, after all—I can be realistic about it. Which leads me to another option when discussing illness. Rather than talk about sickness like it’s akin to some freak alien invasion, I can acknowledge that sickness happens. It’s normal for my mortal flesh. Therefore, I can embrace it as an opportunity to remember how my body is weak, and that I am, in fact, getting closer to dying every day.
I know people don't want to face that any kind of illness, or any kind of discomfort, physically or otherwise, is part and parcel of our human existence. We too often think of sickness as separate from who we are as individuals. This is so typical of our current culture. We are default Gnostics now: our bodies must conform to what we think or feel is normal for our innate selves, usually described as our souls. When our bodies fail us—and they do all the time—we see them as bad. It goes without saying that the impulses of our souls must be good. This is nonsense, of course. We’re sinners, so we will want things that are unrealistic or downright terrible for us, be it triathlete physiques at 80 or surgically mutilating biological maleness to make it look female. Or, dare I say, expecting the common cold to skip us when its germs are rampant. Sure, an ounce of Vitamin C prevention is worth a pound of Robitussin “cure,” but the sickness will hit, no matter what we do. This isn’t fatalism; it’s realism.
When we’re sick, it's very difficult to ignore the connection between our souls and our bodies. Those who sought the touch and healing of Jesus knew this intimately. They called out to him, sometimes because they were broken in body, sometimes because demons recognized him, because they knew He could fix (or in the demons’ case, threaten) their mortal conditions. Only Jesus could heal the creeping threat of bodily death so their souls could live. Like them and so many others, I can't promise that I will enjoy the ravages of illness that I experience, wiping my runny nose and coughing fits that wake me deep in the night. But I can thank God that he has given these things to me to remember that from dust I am formed, and to dust I shall return, and only One thing needful will fix me. Soon enough, I will experience no other impediment in my body, and all my illnesses will be gone forever.
