Take a walk in my pajamas: my three illnesses.

This was not, I'm relieved to say, exactly written over my dead body--only against my unflagging resistance. I've never been the least interested in the nuts and bolts of sickness and health. In fact, even when I've been so ill myself that there's been no avoiding them, my position has always been "Just tell me what I'm supposed to do, and who do you like in the World Series?"

So how did I come to write about illness? Innocently enough, and extremely circuitously. In the fall of 1989, the late magazine Lear's asked me to contribute to a symposium on the meaning of the word spiritual, which is the kind of request that usually has the word wastebasket written all over it. For people who try to do this stuff for a living, symposiums are strictly amateur night and a chance to be shown up by Jane Fonda or Hulk Hogan or some other muffin-headed celebrity on a roll; who but an actor can work up a full head of seriousness in three hundred words anyhow?

On the other hand I had a soft spot for Lear's, which had several friends on it and gave great parties, and for once, I also had something to say on the subject, and I thought, "Just this once--and I promise never to do it again," and wrote the following:

Last year I was hit by a barrage of ailments that reintroduced

me to the joys of recuperation, a pleasure I'd almost

forgotten about since I was hit by polio, the A-bomb

of diseases, at the end of World War II. (Hiroshima happened

the same year: fortunately my life has not kept up

this pace.)

The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're

sick. You pray to get better, and if and when you do, you

don't need to be told to be grateful about it: It gushes

out of you. And you discover, in the same giddy rush,

that just being alive, even on a no-frills basis, is astoundingly

good: and this remains, for me, the primal

insight. G. K. Chesterton once said that if a person were

to fall into the waters of forgetfulness and come out on

the other side, he would think he had arrived in paradise.

But all you need to do is spend a couple of months on

your back, or return home from a war and come downstairs

to have breakfast in your own house (I'm told by

veterans that just having a bathroom by yourself can seem

like going to heaven).

So my private proofs for God, or whatever, begin with

this: the sheer capacity for happiness, and one's sense

when it happens, that this is correct and normal and not

some freak of nature. When health returns, it feels like

coming home, with everything just as you left it: and the

other thing, the bad news-the broken leg or even the

mental breakdown-feels like the freak. But now you are

back where you belong, in harmony with the universe.

And from this I deduce with some conviction that the universe

is essentially a good place to be, despite appearances,

and that if it means anything, it means well.

The trick of course is to stay on its good side, and this

would take, has taken, hundreds of books to discuss. Let

me just say quickly: concentration, kindness, and in my

own case the Catholic tradition--there has to be some

tradition--which gives me a sense of companionship over

the centuries. To which I would add, by way of illustration,

that the two most intense and unqualified pleasures

I have had in the last year have been respectively

the marriage of a son and the birth, courtesy of one of

my daughters, of a grandchild. The universe's wishes

can be devious beyond exasperation at times, but I like

to think that it has its simple pleasures too. And on days

like that, even the God of Job can be sensed to smile for

a second.

Beyond that I can only hope that if, in the biblical phrase,

one lives out one's days "in the eye of God," or at least

someplace in the neighborhood, one will someday come

to see old age and death as equally natural and simply

the next thing to do.

I honestly don't know if this thought will help me then,

but it helps me now.

And that, I trusted, was that. It was in truth a blissfully happy time in my life, and I was delighted to tell someone about it, but certainly not to make a big production out of it. After all, what was the message? The Secret of Happiness is to get sick, or break a leg, or come back from the dead, or perhaps to imagine that you've done these things and hope for the best. Then, shortly after that, someone else asked me to take part in a symposium about the meaning of God, and I remember jotting down something like this: "If a certain general hadn't ruined the phrase forever, I would say that `God is the light at the end of the tunnel,' and maybe the light in the tunnel as well, if you're a saint"--but this one I didn't send in. It was basically the same thought anyhow, a celebration of waking up from a bad night and falling head over heels in love with daylight, and I felt the public had had enough of my wisdom on this subject, and I had certainly had enough of dispensing it.

However, my soon-to-be friend Phyllis Theroux wrote me a letter after the Lear's piece asking permission to reprint and circulate it; and awhile later, after we'd met in person, the same lady suggested, so casually that I doubt she remembers it, that I expand the piece into a book someday. A thousand times no! My response was a lot more emphatic than her request. There was no way of expanding this particular material without reaching back into the world of sickness that I had just so cheerfully left; and furthermore, if I couldn't read a whole book about health matters without alternately flinching and falling asleep, how on earth was I going to write one?

On the other side of the ledger was a dawning realization that every time the subject came up in conversation, I had something to say about it that the others hadn't heard before and wanted very much to hear now, just in case it applied to them. Everyone has a tryst with sickness someday, or expects to with various degrees of apprehension, so anyone who has visited that country becomes an automatic object of curiosity. How does it look? How did he take it? How would I take it?

Insofar as I had learned anything new at all in the land of sickness, it gradually occurred to me that maybe I had no choice. Whether you've witnessed a crime, or discovered a pothole or a cure for insomnia, you simply have to skip your next appointment and testify--especially if you believe you have some honest-to-God, nonsugar-coated good news to report. What we had here, in other words, was the literary equivalent of a subpoena in the hands of a surly witness from whom much of this had to be dragged.

And, as it turned out, I was not to be let off lightly with a novel either. My first instinct, like that of a child who has to confess to something embarrassing, was to make up a fictitious character to whom the whole thing really happened. But in matters of sickness and death, you have to put up or shut up; you have to level. Did this happen or didn't it? Does it actually feel like this, or are you just guessing? If you don't know for sure, the experts will move in quick as a blink and sweep your testimony into the disposal, and replace it with the old, outsiders' version, and you might as well have skipped the whole trial.

So stripped (for now--the novel comes next) of the armor of fiction, I toyed for all of five seconds or so with the possibility of writing impersonal nonfiction. Just the facts, ma'am. On the first day, patient complained of such-and-such and noticed so-and-so, a soreness of the this and a swelling of the that. But what you really remember is the moment when the wallpaper began to drive you crazy, especially combined with the doctor's cough: sickness becomes personal immediately. And that's the part people want to hear about. The symptoms they can get from a textbook. What they want right now is to walk for just a day or an hour in your pajamas or hospital gown and listen in on your thoughts and take your measure.

What distinguishes the only three illnesses I've ever had (if you subtract measles, age six) is that all three are generally deemed incurable, and that each has caused me to lose something quite irreplaceable, something I would have sworn I couldn't live without.

The first of my Big Three, polio, cost me, for instance, the world of games, around which my whole world turned: when I wasn't playing them, I was thinking about them and planning a long, happy future with them. ("We're going to Zanzibar this summer!" "Swell--what do they play there? cricket or baseball?"

The second, addiction-depression, deprived me of not just the sleeping pills that brought it on but the whole congenial drinking life, from wine tastings to barbellyings to motor trips through France (who could bear to send back all those wine lists?) to, finally, the best part of all, the solid-gold time spent with friends in the small hours, when for a long moment, held like a note of music, you understand each other perfectly. In short, it cost me nothing less than the best minutes of the day and the best years of my life. Or so it seemed at the time. Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls.

White again, the color of death as far as I'm concerned, and back to the hospital for number three, cancer. So far the jury is still out on this one, and long may it remain so, but the Big C, as they call it in showbiz, has already left a wintery calling card: without giving away too much, I'll just say that C. has made some mean little inroads into the joy of eating, that last redoubt of the sensual man. But as I quickly learned, cancer, even more than polio, has a disarming way of bargaining downward, beginning with your whole estate and then letting you keep the game warden's cottage or the badminton court; and by the time it has tried to frighten you to death and threatened to take away your very existence, you'd be amazed at how little you're willing to settle for.

But how little? A fellow I know lost a whole leg to cancer, and was happier afterward than he'd ever been before, simply because he was alive and the enemy was gone. So one might start the bidding with that. The long, wary truces of cancer that might end at any moment with a call to arms, or might, contrariwise, last forever, send you a command invitation to speculate over and over about precisely why you're putting yourself through all this and whether it's worth it. Is there a point at which life is no longer better than death? Since I've never regarded myself as any kind of Candide or Lemuel Pitkin, who insists on looking on the bright side as life whittles away at his arm, legs, and senses, I'm sure that there must be such a point--some moment when you're ready to fold what's left of your hand and say enough is enough. But in spite of some quite serious whittling, I've never even come close to that point myself.

Quite the reverse. After each of my "unbearable, insupportable" losses, I have felt not only undiminished and unready to die, but quite goofily elated, as I tried to describe in Lear's. As it happens, shortly after writing that ode, or squawk, to joy, I came across a sublime illustration of the mood I'd been talking about in the form of an old, old movie short built around Johnny Mercer's splendid song "GI Jive," showing an average sort of Sad Sack barely surviving the horrors of army life in World War Il and plunging at last into the joys of peace. In the final scene, the war has just ended and our hero capers around a deserted Times Square in civilian clothes, fairly bursting with happiness. That was how I had felt after each of my illnesses, even though I wasn't exactly dancing by the end, but leaning, like some black-comic character, on a pair of canes, sipping Diet Coke to keep my mouth from turning to dust, and wondering where the cancer would strike next. If the war is over for now and the bombing has stopped, that's simply how you feel, whatever the damage.

At least, that's how I felt--and by chance, how every survivor I know seems to have felt too. When I was a kid, religious folk would say things like "God only seems to send polio to people who are strong enough to take it," but experience has since told me that the folk had it exactly backward. To judge only from the polio veterans I've known, God has made just about everybody strong enough to take it, so affliction can land where it likes. All landing fields are fully equipped. I have yet to meet a victim of this plague who has not made a perfect adjustment to it, and then some--Exhibit A being Franklin Roosevelt, whose gargantuan, cartoonlike self-assurance saw us through war and Depression as if they were just more pool exercises.

Afflictions have an uncanny ability to clean up after themselves, and even leave you laughing, but they obviously can't guarantee to root out deep-seated psychological glitches--although they have a pretty good record with those too.

Perhaps the hardest glitches for nature to cope with are those caused by any feel-good chemicals that may have been brought in to help out. The great James Thurber, for instance, was never reconciled to his blindness, partly because it led him in the course of it through countless painful eye operations, each of which must have raised and dashed his hopes brutally; but partly also because he seems to have tried to drink his way out of trouble, and it simply can't be done: booze is like an exit door painted on the wall for which alcoholics and other optimists manage to fall every time. There is no sadder specimen on heaven or earth than an old drunk around two in the morning after he's just hit the wall for the thousandth time, and it doesn't matter how good or bad his eyesight is or how many operations he's had.

Which brings me to Illness No. 2, addiction-depression. During the whole time I was under this particular cloud, I would have sold my soul cheerfully (if I could have done anything cheerfully) just to hear from someone else who had passed this way and could tell me what was actually happening to me and what to expect next. But among all the thousands of inspirational and pseudoscientific words I could find on the subject, not one came close either to describing what I was going through, or suggesting anything useful to do about it except go to meetings and talk, talk, talk, which is the water I swim in anyway. So I've had to write it myself, scene for scene--all the things I would like to have read back then.

A book about health is perforce a book about sickness, and in the matter of artificially induced depressions, there seems to be an almost exact equation between down and up, as if one could with a mighty effort turn the minus sign next to one's melancholy into a plus and watch one's spirits rise like mercury--just in time, in my case, to take on Illness No. 3.

No two of these things are identical, and one finds that the cards have been shuffled again for cancer. The usual pattern of remission and recurrence of this illness lends a stop-start quality to any elation you may feel over its high points. Every cheer comes with an asterisk, but so does every groan, as the will to live keeps pounding back. And there's a certain excitement to be had just from living on the edge: you are more fully alive then you have ever been, and getting more out of each day. My late friend Anatole Broyard reported being suffused with an unearthly euphoria when he first got wind of his cancer, along with a curious sense of superiority to average mortals, who never get to see their lives as clearly as he now saw his. Civilian readers I talked to about Broyard's epiphany couldn't make head or tail of it, but it made perfect sense to me. Although I had never greeted my own bad news in that particular way, it was certainly in the realm of possibility. It's just that Anatole received his apocalypse a little earlier than most, and was spared the dark night that usually precedes it.

For most of us, there's no avoiding the fact that learning you've got cancer can be a gruesome experience, especially if your system is depressed at the time anyway, as mine was; but even with your heart wedged deep in your boots, the speed of mental adjustment can be quite uncanny, and the number of people I've known who've lived and died anywhere from serenely to downright happily with cancer defies normal imagining, almost as Broyard's essay did [Intoxicated by My Illness, Clarkson Potter].

I guess the revelation for me was to find that a good death doesn't defy imagining at all, once you've had cancer yourself for even a little while. With that thunderclap event, why aren't we all out dancing right now? Well, there are complications. Once one's old self has moved back in, new stories will start up, and some of them will probably be sad ones. For reasons dating back at least to the Garden of Eden, the greatest happiness imaginable wears off with sickening speed and suddenly isn't good enough for us. A religious person might point out that we weren't put on earth to dance all day anyway, although some returners from hell come awfully close to it. A friend of mine who spent four years in the Pacific Theater of the Absurd in World War II, flinching from trees that might or might not contain Japanese soldiers and jumping out of his skin every time a twig snapped, told me that he could hardly look at his suburban lawn of an evening without wanting to kiss it. "Life can't get dull enough for me," he said.

This would be an extreme case: if you go down far enough you might conceivably stay up forever, which is something for depression cases to look forward to, if they can still look forward to anything in that condition. But for the run of mankind, the dancing does have to stop sometime, and you are left with nothing but an unbelievably good memory.

Which, as I said in Lear's, I've been living off ever since.

WILFRID SHEED, a former Commonweal literary editor (1967-69), is the author of People Will Always Be Kind, among other novels and works of criticism. This essay is excerpted from the introductory chapter of In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, to be published in March. [C] 1995 by Wilfrid Sheed Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.