Description
Skin for Skin
Job 2: 1-8
My first wife lived with multiple sclerosis for forty-three years. It was after about the first third of this period that the illness started having a lasting effect on her. She found it harder to walk, and she had a tough time working things out and remembering things, and she naturally didn’t have the energy for the relationship with me that she had when we were younger. She then lived for more than twenty-five years with the illness taking more and more of a toll. One of my unsettling reflections on that time is that if I had known a third of the way through our marriage how long the process of her increasing disability was going to last, I am not sure I could have coped with the knowledge. Yet the gradual nature of the process gave me time to keep adjusting to new realities. My image for the way this worked is that it resembled weight training (not that I have done weight training!). You learn to lift one weight, and you can’t imagine you could lift one that was twice as heavy, but gradually you learn to lift heavier and heavier weights...