Is a Many-Splendored Thing

[Gita]

I am watching a video about an 804-pound man who lost 330 pounds in one year and is able to go outdoors for the first time in a decade.

The camera shows a face devoid of bones, a voice light as a girl's, no facial hair, a human neutered by fat. His legs are pink rolls unrecognizable as distinct calves or thighs containing femurs, tibias or fibulas, and the flesh toward his ankles is a bruised blue color.

He walks slowly down the sidewalk and  tells the tv world, "I could not have done it without my wonderful trainer or my loving wife," while both women hover, smiling anxiously.

The "before" footage shows him splayed across a bed, oxygen tubes to his nose, unable to wash, dress or toilet himself, beached on a posturpedic shore.

And yet, the viewer notices, there is a wife who cared for him in his inexplicable hugeness for all those years, and isn't love a mystery shrouded in a riddle?

 

 

 

 

[Gita]

Or the voice of the late Amy Winehouse: I'm not going to rehab, I say no, no, no.

[Brad Rose]

I like this piece a lot. I agree with Teresa, its hard to be a human being. Even for the lucky ones. I hear strains of Detox Mansion as I read this piece. It's hard to be somebody/ Its hard not to fall apart./ Up on rehab mountain, we learn these things by heart."
http://youtu.be/ULKmb3_P_N8

[Angela]

That is so very sick.  I mean, someone had to bring him all that food and probably help him get it to his mouth.  I've got issues with this.  They both need something bad.  Usually I'm pretty understanding and passive when it comes to judging people, but for some reason it just makes me fucking angry.  For god's sake.

[Stephen Torelli]

Dysfunctional lifestyles, the more you see the less you understand. Excellent write!

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

Someone I know once said about married couples:  When there's pathology in one, you'll find pathology in the other.  I tend to agree.

[bolton carley]

i'm officially icked out.  but it is a mysterious thing.  i guess we all have our own way of seeing things.  quite the write, gita!

[Teresa]

I watched "Intervention" last night, about a mother giving her grown son cash (to buy more meth) and pills.  She said she let him live with her (and not work) and gave him drugs so that, "I won't ever lose him."  She was killing him so she wouldn't lose him.  This is love?  My brain got all twisted over that one.  And this situation with the morbidly obses man, although very different, is another example of loving someone to death.  It's sad and moving, and I have no doubt this wife loves her husband, but in a dysfunctional way.  It's hard to be human.  Excellent writing.

[Bill Floyd]

Your description is vivid.  As to the wife, I'm split: perhaps it's admirable devotion, or perhaps there's some pathology within her that's fed by taking on the role of nurse, by having someone utterly dependent upon her.  I guess that could apply to any spouse of either gender, and it speaks to your heart that you interpreted it in a loving way rather than a queasily co-dependent one.  

[Gita]

Here's Connie Francis singing the song (after the obligatory youtube ad).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrLtoA3Q-Ag

[Joey Delgado]

I love your description of the man in line three. I can see it and I didn't even have to watch it. This piece has tart and heart. How do you do that?