In sickness and in health

INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 46

THE WORST THING WE READ™

The Spouse Who Won’t Get Back to Normal

VIRUSES ARE NOT particularly interested in your feelings, except to the extent that your feelings might wear down your body and make it more welcoming to viruses. Nevertheless, Malaka Gharib of NPR wrote an essay about how the Covid pandemic bumps up against her feelings—namely, her feeling of frustration about what she called her husband's "fears of getting Covid again."

What's he so afraid of? Gharib wrote:

In 2022, while I was 7 months pregnant, my husband and I got Covid. While it was a mild case for me, he had scary, lingering symptoms. He said it felt like there was "an engine humming in his chest." He experienced frightening fits of insomnia. And his personality changed — my normally upbeat husband became uncharacteristically depressed.

After a few months, his symptoms went away, but his fears of getting Covid didn't. He is immunocompromised and his doctors warned him that if he got sick again, it may complicate his autoimmune disease. Plus, he didn't want to repeat his traumatic ordeal, especially with a baby on the way.

Right away, the focus was slipping. Was the problem that her husband is afraid of Covid, or was it that her husband and his doctors have decided that he will be vulnerable to extra harm if he catches another case of Covid? For the purposes of the essay, the real problem was how all of this affected Gharib. "I want to keep my husband safe and healthy," she wrote. "But I also want our old life back."

But! Somewhere, long ago, a folk belief took hold among journalists that an essay is where you share your guilty feelings with the public. Isn't that what the literary essayists do? Yes, sometimes, but ideally they think carefully about those feelings first.