The Gift for Someone Who Had Been Sick a Long Time

My friend Adaeze was sick for almost two years.

Not the kind of sick that resolves quickly. The slow kind, the managing kind, the kind where your whole life reorganizes itself around appointments and treatments and the question of how you are feeling today asked by everyone you encounter until it becomes the only thing anyone seems to want to know about you.

She handled it with a particular kind of grace that I found both admirable and quietly painful to watch. She did not complain much. She kept her sense of humor. She showed up for other people's things even when she was tired. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I noticed that people had stopped asking her about anything except her health. As if the illness had become her whole identity in other people's eyes, and she was just waiting for it to be over so she could be herself again.

I wanted to give her something that skipped over the illness entirely.

She had been a serious amateur photographer before she got sick. Good enough that her photos had been in a small local show once. She had talked about getting back to it when she felt better, the way people talk about things they are not sure they will get back to.

I did not get her anything health-related. No self-care kit. No candles for healing. Nothing that referenced being sick at all.

I got her a new lens for her camera. A specific one she had mentioned wanting years before, before everything changed. I included a card that said: not a get-well gift. A get-back-to-it gift. I want to see what you are going to shoot.

She cried.

Not sad crying. The other kind.

She said no one had talked to her about her photography in almost two years. She said she had forgotten that it was part of who she was.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can give someone who has been defined by something hard is a reminder that there is a whole person in there that has nothing to do with it.