JUDITH FORD

At the time, she got sick she was successful psychotherapist with a relatively new second marriage, a full-time clinical practice, and three children, ages twelve, eleven, and eighteen months. She was also a runner, a yoga-practitioner, a dancer, and a writer. Eventually, she recovered enough to go home from the hospital and to slowly rebuild her life. It took months for her to wean off the medications and to regain her energy. 

 

Two years after her summer in the hospital, Judith's mother suffered a massive stroke and was never again able to live outside a nursing home. Her father, now living alone in the apartment he had shared with Judith's mother, was in end-stage emphysema and had difficulty with everyday tasks like eating and breathing.

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In the emergency room, on the day of her stroke, while her mother lay half-conscious and partially paralyzed on a gurney, she said to Judith, “Well, now you’ll have something good to write about.”  Judith had no intention of writing her  mother’s –or her father’s—story but little by little, the things her parents were dealing with in their final years began to parallel the things she had dealt with during her illness. They were facing (or not facing) their own mortality, their own losses, and doing what they could to control the uncontrollable.  

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Excerpt from Fever of Unknown Origin:

 

“After my illness and my parents’ deaths I saw, in a way I’d never seen before, that one day, now or later, I was going to lose everything that mattered to me. Everything that was a part of the tangled roots of my life, everything I was attached to, mixed up in, held close, everything I loved. When I paid attention—which I’m certainly not brave enough to do all the time–I saw what a huge risk it is to continue to love the world as strongly and as hungrily as I did. To love the people I loved as deeply as I did.

"That’s a tough vision to carry. Except that along with it, came this other thing, a kind of consolation prize. Right along with the sense of impending loss, I found I had an expanded view of the world, a mix of beauty and light that at times was so stunning it brought me to tears. Not all the time, but nearly every day, in one way or another, I run smack up against the insistent beauty of the ordinary, physical world.”