XLIII
INVALIDISM A GRAFT
Do you ever think that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well? It is just plain stealing. And it is the most despicable form of petty larceny, because it is robbing those who love you, and trust you and who are defenseless against you. They cannot lock up their sympathies, their peace of mind, their personal service, their money, safely away from your pilfering. Of course, there are many people who are really ill. Through no fault of their own, they are smitten by some terrible disease, and they deserve all that we can give of pity and help as they go stumbling down the agonized way to the grave.
These words are not for them, but for that multitude of men and women with whom sickness is merely a graft, a camouflage for selfishness, and a blanket excuse with which they cover up all their sins of omission and commission, and that furnishes them a perfect alibi for doing everything they want to do, and leaving undone those things which they do not wish to do.
Ninety per cent of all the sickness in the world is voluntary, or at least comes through contributory negligence. People are sick because they are not willing to make the sacrifices to keep well.
And curiously enough they justify themselves by claiming that their own health is a personal matter. “If I make myself sick, I am the one who has to suffer,” they say. If this were true, far be it from the rest of us to interfere with their pleasures. But it isn’t true. No man or woman is sick to himself or herself alone. We have to listen to their groans. We have to minister to them. We have to do their work. We have to pay their doctor’s bills. We have to put up with their irritability and unreason because sickness is supposed to give people carte blanche to do and say all the things that well people do not dare to do. When ill health is an act of God, as shipping manifests say, and therefore beyond our control, it is one thing. When it is the result of weak self-indulgence it is another thing. Our sympathies and our assistance go out to the victim of tuberculosis or cancer, but we have nothing but contempt for the glutton who keeps himself sick from overeating.
In every business house where women are employed there is such a large percentage of them absent from work on account of sickness, especially during the winter, that the question is often raised whether the delicate feminine constitution can stand the strain of commercial life. Stuff and nonsense! It isn’t the work that is hurting the girls. It is the way they dress and live.
They feel that they have a perfect right to risk bad colds and pneumonia by coming to work on rainy, sloppy, sleety days in paper-soled satin pumps and chiffon stockings, and with not enough clothes on to keep an icicle warm. They consider it their own affair if they prefer to spend their money on an imported hat instead of on nourishing food. They think if they come to the office with a nervous headache that makes them blind and stupid with pain, and was brought on by too many nights of successive jazzing, it is a matter between them and the aspirin bottle alone. But it isn’t. They are not giving their employers a square deal. They are not giving them the services they pay for. They are upsetting the routine of the office, and laying the burden of their work on the shoulders of other people.
Look at the invalid wives you know! Dozens of them who have brought nervous prostration on themselves by overwork, or too many clubs and causes, or too much society. Don’t we all know women who go on orgies of housecleaning, or dressmaking, though they know perfectly well that every such debauch is going to end up in a spell of sickness which will call for doctors and trained nurses? Don’t we know women who wear themselves to tatters over church fairs and club campaigns? Don’t we know women who play bridge every day until they are so nervous that they become unbearable at home and their husbands have to send them off to sanatoriums to get a little peace and rest themselves? We do.
We marvel that these women never stop to consider how they are defrauding their families. They never consider what a wickedly dishonest thing it is to deprive a husband and children of a healthy, strong wife and mother, and give them a neurotic, irritable, cross, nerve-wrecked creature who makes the home about as cheerful as a grave-yard, and in which they have always to walk softly and speak in whispers for fear of disturbing the lady who has just gone to bed with a neuralgia headache.
Then there is the large army of women who enjoy poor health, who are professional invalids for the simple reason that they are too lazy and indolent to make the effort to be well. They are quitters who literally take life lying down. They cultivate small ailments. They acquire the sanatorium habit, and they expect to be pitied and babied instead of being ostracized as dishonest grafters who snatch the very bread out of the mouths of their families to pay their unnecessary doctor’s bills. We all know dozens of these women who suffer from imaginary complaints, and we have seen many of them cured by their husband’s death, when they had to quit being sick, and go to work and support themselves.
That is why I say that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well.