Jerk says: “…but you look so well.”
Reply: “But you look like hell. What have you got?”

Jerk says: “But you look so well.”
Reply: “Yeah well, appearances can be deceiving. You look like a kind, sensitive person.”

Sigh. Try as we might, I don’t think we’ll ever come up with a pithy one liner that will forever cram shut the big mouths of the insensitive. I suspect it’s because there is nothing that can be said that will make people mature enough to face what animates a lot of their ignorance and callousness: the fear of their own potential infirmity and their ultimate mortality.

Think about it. Here are folks like us, walking (or not) around reminding all the “norms” that unpleasant things might happen to them. Their denial of our ill health (you look so well) and/or their urge to fix us with quake “cures,” really has nothing to do with us - but it speaks volumes about their own fears. MS and accident victims like me are especially troubling because we didn’t “do” anything that made us ill. We are just hostages of uncontrollable, indiscriminate, terrifying fate. After my accident a friend asked me if I ever thought, “Why me?” I told her no, that I thought, “Why not me?” The woman never called me again.

That brings us to the topic of our incredible, vanishing friends. One thing I’ll say, is that this experience has really separated the wheat from the chafe – and sometimes I’ve been shocked by which friend ended up in which pile.

There was one friend in particular. Before my accident, I’d driven her back and forth to the hospital and held her hand through all her cancer treatments when her “adult” sons couldn’t handle it. Shortly after I got hurt, she told me she didn’t see much point in our socializing because my brain damage meant we couldn’t really talk like we used to. (I still didn’t have the heart to tell her what the chemo had done to her own intellectual powers.) She was an aspiring novelist. What she was really saying was, “You’re no longer useful to me because your accident has pushed you out of writing.”

When you think about it, I bet you’ll realize that some of your “friends” have dropped you because you are no longer useful to them. When I read the MS forum, what I see are a lot of caring, together people. Before you fell ill, I bet you were the folks who organized activities, who people turned to for advice and who were the first ones at the door with a casserole and a strong shoulder when someone was in trouble. Now that you might need a little assistance and understanding, all the folks you helped all those years aren’t there – because they were takers. What I’ve come to realize was that some of my friendships were one-way. Frankly, I’m glad those pretenders are gone. My social circle may be smaller, but the folks in it are the real deal. A genuine friend is worth a hundred of the “so-called” variety.

Cheers