Free When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté Page A

room. Lou slept on the couch.
    Gehrig has been described as a quintessential “mama’s boy.” He lived with his mother until his marriage, in his early thirties—a union the mother accepted only with marked ill grace.
    Stephen Hawking was diagnosed at the age of twenty-one. His biographers write: “During his first two years at Cambridge, the effects of the ALS disease rapidly worsened. He was beginning to experience enormous difficulty in walking, and was compelled to use a stick in order to move just a few feet. His friends helped him as best they could, but most of the time he shunned any assistance. Using walls and objects as well as sticks, he would manage, painfully slowly, to traverse rooms and open areas. There were many occasions when these supports were not enough…. On some days Hawking would turn up at the office with a bandage around his head, having fallen heavily and received a nasty bump.” 6
    Dennis Kaye, a Canadian who died of ALS, published
Laugh, I Thought I’d Die
in 1993. His book has the reader doubled over with laughter, even knowing the author’s fate—exactly as Kaye had intended. Like several other writers with ALS, he remained undaunted by the exorbitant physical demands of writing without the use of his fingers or hands.“Let me start by saying that ALS is not for the faint of heart,” he begins his chapter titled “Lifestyles of the Sick and Feeble.” “In fact, I only recommend it to those who truly enjoy a challenge.” Kaye tapped out his volume with a stick fastened to his forehead. Here is his description of the “ALS personality”: “One seldom sees words like ‘deadbeat’ or ‘lazy’ used in the same sentence as ALS. In fact, one of the only traits ALSers seem to share is an energetic past. In almost every case, victims were either classic over-achievers or chronic workaholics…. I’ve been called a workaholic, and I suppose if the work-boot fits … but technically, even though I worked all the time, I was never driven by an addiction to work so much as an aversion to, perhaps even a disdain for, boredom.” 7
    Another Canadian with ALS, Evelyn Bell, authored her book
Cries of the Silent
by wearing a laser light attached to a special glass frame, shining it on a spelling board, painstakingly pointing out each letter of each word to volunteer assistants for transcription. For her, too, such zealous dedication to a goal was not new. She relates that she had lived her life “at a feverish pace.” She was the mother of three children while building a successful business career: “It was a challenge to juggle home-making, parenting, business, gardening, interior decorating and chauffeuring, but
I loved the roles and performed them with great intensity
…. During the years of raising a family, my Nutri-Medics business grew extensively and I enjoyed many company cars and numerous trips to foreign lands. I reached many levels of success in the business, being top achiever in Canada for a number of years. I felt I wanted to be a success at parenting and everything I did.” With unconscious irony, Evelyn Bell reports all this just after writing that
“we knew we could always replace money but not our health or our marriage.” 8
    Disease frequently causes people to see themselves in a different light, to reassess how they have lived their lives. A sudden realization hit Dennis Kaye one day as—with “glib satisfaction”—he watched his father, and two employees, doing work that he, Dennis, had always unquestioningly performed on his own. “Before long,” he writes, “satisfaction turned to frustration…. Almost all my accomplishments were in one way or another connected not to
my
aspirations, but to the aspirations of my father. I don’t want this to turn into an Oprah-style confession, but from the time I was a kid working my summer holidays, I’d been helpingmy father meet his goals and obligations. Except for a couple of years in my late teens, I’d spent