Illness and Sickness: Two Ways of Interpreting Health

Here Ken shares his touching story about falling in love with his wife Treya, who passed away shortly after they were married after being diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of breast cancer ("The most glorious, radiant event I've ever seen—she went out in a radically realized state that changed everyone around her, and certainly me....") While struggling with Treya's health, Ken encountered two very different ways people interpret any sort of health problems we might experience, which he calls the difference between illness and sickness. While illness refers to the actual physiological condition a person may be suffering through (e.g. auto-immune deficiency), sickness refers to the cultural interpretations of the illness (e.g. all our accumulated beliefs about AIDS, including sexuality, race, class, values, etc.) In many cases, the sickness can actually be worse than the illness—as Ken mentions, physically treating Treya's cancer only required a few hours per month, while dealing with everyone's projections and sense of meaning around the illness was a full time job....