My friend is in the hospital, too sick for any food or flowers I might bring. Too sick for songs or stories. Too sick for silly nostalgia: “Remember our sailing lesson?” sounds random and rude.
Right now it all comes down to cells and drugs and doctoring. Unable to provide those, I feel useless.
Feeling useless – worse yet, telling you I do – makes me feel even more useless: not just basically useless as in being neither a magician nor a physician but now also a whiny baby making everything all about me.
Feeling useless is an under-discussed form of suffering which, I think, drives depression. It measures, like calipers, the distance between whom and what and how and where we are and whom and what and how and where we would be, could be, should be if we were smarter, stronger, richer and otherwise superior. And/or if we were best pals with a deity, if we were omniscient and omnipotent.
That span between reality and possibility can poison every circumstance. However healthy and happy we and our loved ones are, surely somewhere more health and happiness exist.
Against the hard rock of serious illness and such crises, would-haves-should-haves seem unbearable.
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