In her Illness as Metaphor, the late Susan Sontag dissects and analyzes numerous instances in which illness has been used, wrongly, as she sees it, in a metaphorical way that tends to point to or underscore other issues or causes which may not necessarily serve the ones suffering from a particular illness.  To wit, metaphors of illness have often been used to justify various actions, not all of which serve the common good.

     Metaphorical or not, intrinsic to illness, it seems, is a fundamental assumption of weakness, that the one suffering from an illness is somehow physically or psychologically weaker than those who are not.  Often this is true.  On the other hand, often it is not.  Those who are sick among us often present to us a picture not of weakness but of strength, a portrait of steadfastness and fortitude, a vision of a decision to live life to the fullest regardless of the circumstances in which one finds herself.  It is a choice which those of us who are healthy often overlook, burdened as we let ourselves become by our various existential challenges.  We forget what it is really like to be healthy and well.  We come to suppose that it is normal.
     Normality, however, often breeds complacency and myopia.  It forgets to look behind and around itself, to dig beneath the surface, to seek out the hidden and unseen.
     For this reason, perhaps it is in the sick that we can best learn about health and wholeness, for it is in the sick, undermined physically and, sometimes, psychologically--but who are often, to reiterate, nonetheless stronger than most of us will ever be--that we see the real essence of health.  Being healthy is far more than physical and mental wholeness.  Genuine health is admitting to the fact of our evanescence and fraility, to embrace the truth of our tiny place in the universe and the ineluctable finitude that comes with it, to recognize the inescapable reality of space and time and the God who made them, and to be, regardless of how we feel, physically or otherwise, comfortable with and secure in it.  Real health is to recognize that we, human we be, are weak, weak in body, weak in spirit, weak in mind, our knowledge limited, our purview small.  Real health is to admit to our dependence on the grace of God.
     Sometimes it takes sickness to awaken us to who we really are.