On My Last Leg

"One afternoon at the start of April, I am on my way home from an errand when my legs seize up; they are suddenly so stiff that walking feels impossible. Standing on the sidewalk, I call my husband. Luckily, he is working at home and comes to get me. Hanging on to him, I am able to shuffle the last two blocks."

"In the E.R. at NewYork-Presbyterian, a couple of hours later, while I wait to be seen by the neurologist on call, I watch a middle-aged mother fussing over her twentysomething daughter, who seems to be suffering from a similar affliction. The mother is clearly a person of means, and she badgers the nursing staff about when her daughter's private room will be ready. Her sense of entitlement is irksome; nevertheless, I'm impressed by her devotion to her daughter."

""It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backward," Kierkegaard sagely wrote in his journal, in 1843. "But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forward." Since my mobility became impaired in April, however, it has sometimes felt as if I were living backward, too-perhaps because learning to walk is regarded as one of the most significant developmental milestones in the life of an infant."

A woman experiences sudden severe leg stiffness in April that renders walking nearly impossible. Her husband, working from home, assists and helps her shuffle the last blocks to safety. Hours later in the NewYork-Presbyterian E.R., she observes a middle-aged mother fussing over her twentysomething daughter, noting both entitlement and devotion. The episode triggers memories of a hospitalization for multiple sclerosis almost twenty-eight years earlier and of a mother unable to cope with illness. The woman appreciates her seventeen-year-old daughter's competence. A Kierkegaard quote about understanding life backward and living it forward frames her sense of relearning to walk and living partly backward, while the health crisis connects to a contemporary political moment referencing the 2024 election.

Read at The New Yorker