Osler's Razor

On Friday night, I headed over to the Bryant-Lake Bowl, wove my way through the restaurant and the bowling alley back to the theater, and saw Sherry Jo Ward perform her one-woman show "STIFF."

I know Sherry from my Baylor days, and she and her husband Thomas lived here in Minneapolis later (they are back in Texas now). Sherry has contracted a very rare neuromuscular condition called Stiff Persons Syndrome, which (according to the National Institute of Neurological disorders and Stroke) is marked by ever-increasing muscle stiffness and acute sensitivity to certain stimuli. The play recounts the physical and emotional effects of this change in her life.

It's very real. And brave. We so rarely put our most vulnerable selves out there, and this play was about a compounded vulnerability.

But what a reaction to a tragedy! To reject the impulse to crawl under the porch like a sick cat and instead take all that comes with an illness and put it out for the public to see, to invite them to compare their own misfortunes to this one. And everyone in the audience-- the other people with SPS, the old friends from Sherry's time in Minnesota, the people who wandered in from the street-- likely did exactly that. That's what art does so often: it says "Here's something. What about you?"

It made my own fears of aging shift. Yeah, I notice things-- that when I run just a few miles I feel it, that I need reading glasses more often than not. But I'm complaining? Really?

Brutal honesty about one's own challenges is not really a brutality. It is a gift.