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Chapter One
I want to tell the story of an improbable
journey. A journey not chosen. It is a long, circuitous tale
filled with the unexpected. This story is about the fullness
of life: of illness and health; of suffering and despair;
of healing unexpected. This is a journey of improbable experiences;
of encountering the mysterium tremendum, of coming
face to face with the great questions and mysteries of the
universe.
Where to start? I start with reluctance.
For years I toyed with the idea of recording my experiences.
There are reasons to share a personal story. One is to document,
to record. Another is to find commonality with others who
have shared similar fates. I made some attempts. In the end
I gave it up as a bad idea. Too sad, too revealing, too personal.
But I have determined to overcome my reluctance. I tell my
story to bear witness and share with others an account of
grave and difficult circumstances.
Like all stories, mine is unique. In
1981, I faced a personal calamity when I was diagnosed with
an intractable illness. I struggled long and hard through
surgery and partial recovery relying, without success, on
Western medicine. In 1989 I entered the world of alternative
medicine. It changed my life. I improved and my condition
was ameliorated. But there was a difficult underside.
I found myself in a place of maximum
ambiguity. It challenged my relationships, my family and friends.
I had graduated as a history major from the University of
California at Berkeley and worked for the Washington Bureau
of the Los Angeles Times. Alternative medicine was
itself a second phase of difficulty. Another lonely road.
My father said, “Gloria, you are
going back to the Middle Ages.”
“They built beautiful cathedrals
in the Middle Ages,” I answered.
My peregrinations led me back to my
beginnings. Culture and differences. Although I have lived
in the United States since I was one year old, I was born
in Chihuahua, Mexico. My inheritances are Mexican, my father,
and Spanish, my mother. I grew up in the context of three
different worlds: the United States, Mexico, and Spain. I
travel easily through the three cultures. Each has different
sensibilities, each of them valid. Each has a singular view
of the world.
One year in Chihuahua, I had a conversation
with my cousin Meche. We discussed how to maneuver and negotiate
a set of immediate difficulties. I told her I saw no way,
The situation was clearly intractable.
She responded, “¡Todo tiene remedio, menos la
muerte!” There is a remedy for everything except death!
Although illness is neither another
country nor another culture, it is another realm. You bring
your culture with you into the space we call illness. I knew
instinctively that within each culture there is a nomenclature
for illness. In the United States we value self-reliance and
independence above all else. We admire personal power and
freedom. It does not make it a good place to be young, old
or sick, times when personal power has not yet developed or
has ebbed. In America the term invalid truly means not valid.
My Filipina helpers tell me when they
are old they will return to the Philippines to be cared for
by their families. They dread being sick or old in this country.
Latin cultures understand powerlessness
as a fact of life. There is no shame. Children are protected
and old people are cared for. Illness is acknowledged as an
inevitable part of the human condition. But to accept fate
is not to be passive. Mexicans confront death and illness
with utter lucidity, and they comfort the afflicted. Above
all, they are connected. The Spanish sensibilities that have
stood me in good stead are an imperious individualism, quixotic
attachment to lost causes, and stoical endurance.
America: absorbed with youth and health,
egalitarian, credulous; Mexico: warm, connected, caring; Spain:
aristocratic, unbending. Taken together they are traits that
refuse to “go gentle into that good night.”
I accepted and coped with my illness
in my unique cross-cultural context. Because I lived in one
place did not mean I had to accept its cultural sensibilities,
particularly the ones that did not help. Instead I reached
above and beyond. I conversed with other ideas and drew them
into my daily life. I learned to accept and incorporate new
information, alternative medical treatment as well as spiritual
and religious resources. I tell the story of a new way of
seeing and being in the world, beyond medicine and beyond
illness.
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