Illness
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: January 28, 2006

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag
–Illness as metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

but i believe it can be read more 
than one way. you can see illness as something terrible: infecting 
us, taking us away, removing us from all that we that is dear. but i 
prefer to see illness another way: something that binds us, brings 
us together in a common de-humanity, that holds all of us close, 
and some a bit closer. it equals us. makes us the animals we are. 
makes us humble. and most of all, it brings great value to those 
things which we have neglect, and adds immense value to those 
things which we hold dear.
the woman who wrote this quote beat cancer 2 times, and on the 
third, she was terribly afraid of it; afraid of illness, but mostly 
afraid of death. 
and yet she wrote it. and i think that’s what counts.