I wrote this piece some years ago when I was still working. The fifty-year-old daughter of my mother’s best friend had died instantly of a sudden heart attack while out running with her dog. The dog stayed by her side on the snowy sidewalk until they were discovered.
The piece isn’t specifically about chronic fatigue syndrome, but I think it belongs in this blog for two reasons. One, the vast majority of ME/CFS patients are women. I hope both medical researchers and sociologists are looking into why that is the case. Two, the lack of exercise in my life now due to the risk of post-exertional malaise, combined with a family history of heart disease, does have me worried about my own cardiac health. Living with chronic fatigue syndrome has slowed me down immeasurably, but I know I still need to pay attention to the things that are not right.
All over the United States, women in their fifties and sixties are dropping. Into snow banks as they run their dogs, on the floors of their bedrooms as they rise from another poor night’s sleep, in the aisles of grocery stores between the boxed pastas and the canned vegetables. They have no time to clutch at the hearts that are ceasing to beat. They have no warning.
Except . . .
. . . the feeling on some days or over weeks or even months that something is not right. Not the same things that are always not right—the subordinate positions at work that don’t do justice to their skills and intelligence, the exhausting tensions between their husbands and sons, the hunger they feel all the time because lunch is never more than crackers and an apple. This is something different, something hard to touch. No chest pains. Maybe some heart palpitations. No pain in the upper left arm. Maybe an uncharacteristic headache. A touch of nausea. Catching themselves about to fall at the bottom of the stairs. Putting the kitchen sponge in the refrigerator.
And then, without any warning at all, they are gone. Their families are in shock. Their friends and coworkers protest, but she was so healthy!
What the friends and loved ones didn’t see was how many times a day these women paused, their fingers over their keyboards, and thought, why in hell do I have to reply to this email? How many times a day they pushed themselves up from their desks to solve another problem that was supposed to be someone else’s responsibility. How many times they hoped someone else would plan and cook the nourishing dinner they really needed. How many times they got in their cars and quick turned on the radio because if they left themselves any quiet in which to think they would come to conclusions their lives would not support.
Instead, they kept going—working, shopping, solving, caring—until that thing they couldn’t touch became their last hard truth.