The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

He cannot know how it will go for him, and yet, as the title of his book asserts, he insists the disease has been a blessing. The diagnosis, he told me, served as a wake-up call. “What did it wake you up to?” I asked. “The finite nature of this life, for one thing. It brought the truth of my mortality into a more felt, easier-to-grasp dimension. While we all know it intellectually, psychologically we function with an avoidance or disregard for the reality of death. After the diagnosis, I’d be having conversations with people in the awareness that this might be the last conversation I ever had with that person. And that creates an extraordinary degree of shared presence, listening, care. So yes, total transformation. Day to day when I get out of bed, there is a practice of fully recognizing the gift of this moment, of this day, of this body, of this breathing happening now.” Ours is a culture wholly averse to death and even aging; think of how many products are geared toward erasing or “reversing” the signs of oncoming infirmity, the physical reminders of life’s finitude. Here, then, is another sense in which healing is an upstream journey: it necessarily involves the full-hearted acceptance of the inevitability of our passing and the determination to experience all the days and moments that lead us to our earthly exit.