Serious illness and organ transplant directly challenge many of our basic assumptions about personal identity. Such challenges may impose shifts upon the candidate or recipient. These shifts in personal identity are those that we discuss throughout this chapter and elsewhere in this book.
Serious illness proves that we do not have the control we wish. Our ability to assert personal preferences is limited. When ill, your activities slow down and your energy level is decreased. You need to give up some of your time for doctors' appointments or treatment. These demands force you to prioritize your activities more than usual. You must decide what is most important to do. These and countless other impositions confront directly, the assumption that you are fully in control.
What of our efforts for a stable and desirable identity? Is all lost just because you have a scar on your chest? Is there no hope for you if some things about your self or your lifestyle must change? Of course not. The history of humanity is based on our ability to confront and adapt to adversity.
But is this the ideal that most hold in their minds while they go about daily life? No. Most people live their lives as if they had all eternity available to them. As if the most important aspect of their life was whether their hair is properly in place, or whether they will be able to get a new car this year. If you walked up to somebody and asked him or her if they thought that these were the most important aspects of their life, they would think you a fool. Of course not, they would say. However, if you were a fly on the wall, you would see how preoccupied most people are with their struggle to sustain indefinitely, the identity to which they aspire. Illness shows us how transparent are many of our deep felt assumptions about personal identity.
When challenged in this way, frantic struggle or despair is not the only possible consequences. An opportunity exists to appreciate a new and potentially less egocentric way of relating to the world, an opportunity to see that while your personal identity is important, it may not be all that there is. Your identity can change, but you go on. It shifts along with illness or other life changes, but you survive. An opportunity is offered to appreciate your strength beyond the boundaries of identity or self-image. Whenever the limits to personal identity are forced before us, the door is opened to question. "Is this really all there is? If I do not really have the control that I thought, where does my strength come from? Am I as important as I thought that I was? What are my priorities? What do I really believe in?"
It is during these times when we are most likely to question our assumptions about the absolute importance and power of our own personal identity. "If I can not stop this illness, then who is in control? Where can I find security, if not in my own abilities? I have lost for now, much of what I thought was I. is there something else, something deeper that still remains?" Or you may begin to appreciate better your connections with humanity. "I always thought that I was so independent, so capable. Now I am waiting for some kind family to donate a liver for me. I do not care who they are, whether they are important or not. I just know that I will love them for the gift they will offer me."
Few of us would choose adversity over an easier road. Certainly we would not choose to become ill if we were given a choice. But of course, this is not the point. Life is as it is, with its mixture of pleasure and pain, health and illness. We do not always have a choice over our destiny. It is exactly this reality that forces us to look beyond our own person when trying to make sense of adversity. It is exactly this reality that offers each of us the opportunity to search for ourselves beyond the narrow limits of personal identity.
Harold Kushner said in his book When Bad Things Happen To Good People (1981). "Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason, which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not 'Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?' That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be 'Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?' Alternatively, you might wonder, 'Now that this has happened to me, what does it mean to me? What do I learn from this event? How does it affect who I am?'"