Passport
In the wake of my horrible diagnosis, as I struggled to make sense of what was happening to me and what lay ahead, the opening of an essay by Susan Sontag, read decades ago, tugged at my memory. I remembered her assertion that being seriously ill was a kind of exile or deportation to another place, the kingdom of the sick. A separation. Other writers before and since have explored, expanded on, and argued with the idea of the kingdom or country
of the sick, but there was something, some detail of the way she expressed it that I wanted to recall. I tracked down
Illness as Metaphor and found what I was looking for on the first page: the passport. “Although we prefer to use only the good pass port, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” In the light of experience, I could see and feel that not-good, sick person passport as if it had been real. It brought Sontag’s cool, almost legalistic words to life, and me to tears.
Cheaply made, its charcoal-grey cover displaying only a biometric chip, the new passport that I imagined was nothing like the two classy and similarly heraldic passports I already possessed: the gold and dark-blue Canadian, and the maroon and gold of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which still for the duration of the post-Brexit transition year allowed me to travel freely anywhere in the European Union.
The grey passport did not confer freedom. Purely restrictive, it contained no space for visas; instead, a few pages of regulations written in tiny hieroglyphic type found on the labels of medications, illegible even when you have your glasses on. A long list of forbidden activities was stapled to the back cover. The stamp, Indefinite, made it clear that I was to remain in the
kingdom of the sick unless judged by persons and processes unknown to be well again.
I could tell the officer behind the Plexiglas that this must be a mistake. How I have a family who
needs me, how I’d never asked for this document, did not fill in any application form, and do not want it. I could weep and beg but she would merely instruct me to look at the scanner.
“Good. Move on.” The crowd I was now part of pushed toward distant exit signs. Every kind of language and diversity was there. Elderly, young, even children. Bandages, crutches, wheelchairs. Some looked sick, others not. A small boy with a shaved head slipped his cold, damp hand into mine. Ahead, a row of revolving doors. Pressed into a compartment with too many others, I tried to protect the boy—only to stumble out, alone, into a car park. I was back at the hospital. Almost home! No. That was only the first impression, a cruel twist. Beneath the familiar surfaces, everything had changed.
Kingdom is perhaps too grand and old-fashioned a word for this “other place” in which the sick must live. This simulacrum pretending to be my life is more akin to a modern state, highly bureaucratic, whether totalitarian or merely dysfunctional.
Even the mental kind of travel is forbidden. I’m compelled now to devote almost all of my attention to observing the nature, frequency, intensity, and duration
of symptoms: Unable to do buttons/put lid on jar/ dress in leggings. Hands v. weak. Things with two hands more difficult. Tremors worse. Juddering in arms. Walk: 55 minutes . . . I’ve filled several notebooks with scrawled records of this kind, some so faintly written as to be nearly illegible. Such focus is necessary, yet also terribly destructive in the way it monopolizes the mind: the huge, rich, complex world beyond one’s body and immediate environment fades at times into a vaguely realized backdrop, a view of something now beyond reach.
As for who and where was I before I had to take up this additional, entirely involuntary citizenship, some things have not changed: I was and always will be the mother of our two children, who were at the time symptoms first showed themselves in their early
twenties and beginning to live independent lives. I was and hope to remain happily married to their father, Richard, a man I’ve loved for a quarter of a century. We lived then as we do now on a rocky, forested, ferry-dependent island with a population of around twelve thousand. We had built a ridge-top house surrounded by a productive kitchen garden and ten acres of trees only a few kilometres away from the main village, a busy, artsy community hub. It’s a home we will now leave sooner than intended.
Before the new passport, I could work hard both professionally and domestically. I was halfway through writing my ninth novel. Though neither rich nor famous, I was doing work that mattered to me and to my readers. I travelled regularly to present my books in North America and Europe, and for the past twenty years, I had taught writing part-time at a university on Vancouver Island: fulfilling work which had helped me, a relative newcomer to Canada, become part of the local and wider creative communities.
At the beginning of a new semester, I often spoke to my students about how fortunate I thought we all were to be able to spend even a few hours each week imagining. Imagining the daily life of someone they had glimpsed on the bus one morning, or what a character they had already brought to life might do if faced with an impossible-seeming choice (itself to be imagined). How a world or society looked and functioned in granular detail. Likewise, learning an ancient craft: how to make compelling sentences, how to listen to the sounds of words, how to use
imagery, all in the cause of constructing stories that might blossom in another person’s mind. How lucky we were to have, in an era of spreadsheets and profits before people or planet, time set aside to practise and enjoy the particular and very intense form of human communication and connection that creating and sharing stories offers us.
I did not mention to the students that teaching had brought me good fortune in another way too. Back in 1994 when we both still lived in England, I met my future husband at a community education class I had been hired to teach once a week in an overheated portable classroom on the grounds of a high school in Surbiton, an outer suburb of London.
On the first evening, he was both the last student to arrive and exactly on time. I checked him off the register as he slipped into the remaining plastic chair. To say that I immediately noticed him—tall, slim, his gaze both intense and open as he took in the room and the people in it, how the light sweater he wore fit him perfectly—would be an understatement. I had to make myself look away, and for a minute or two, my voice seemed to belong to someone else.
Relationships between students and teachers are, for good reasons, discouraged, and were so even back in 1994. However, I’m very glad we met. I think we might have waited until after the end of that term before acknowledging the attraction between us, had it not happened, in week seven, that my car was stolen. This forced me to take the train, which made me late for class, and at the end of the evening my husband- to-be drove me to a station halfway to my home, saying it was on his way.
The following week, he offered to drive me all the way home. Still, when he parked outside my flat, I didn’t ask him in, though I did kiss him, hurriedly, on the cheek. He offered his phone number. I opened my address book to write it down, and we both saw that it was already there, copied from the register for future use. The way we laughed at this seemed like a
good sign.
It all happened quickly after that: sex, food, love, theatre, art galleries, visits to families, travel to Wales, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Morocco. We were both in our mid-thirties. The power balance did not seem to tip consistently in either direction. We had a frank conversation about children. Given our ages, especially mine (thirty-six), we couldn’t be sure it
would be possible.
We committed to sharing as equally or as fairly as possible the intimate domestic part of life. When our two children came along, we kept to this for both child care and housework, and it is how we’ve lived, until now. It’s an arrangement not everyone would be comfortable with, and one which conventional workplaces and a gendered wage gap make difficult to choose, but we both wanted the same thing, and our luck was such that once we began living together, we had some flexibility. When we met, Richard had recently returned from a year-long adventure with three friends. They had driven a double-decker London bus around the world as a fundraiser for sustainable development charities. In pre-Google days, researching, planning, and organizing this by letter and telephone was a huge, slow, and complex task, which had itself taken two years of Richard’s free time. While this circumnavigation earned the crew a place in the Guinness World Records, it had lost Richard his fiancée. A rough patch followed. Now in a supposedly stop-gap job as manager of two designer goods stores owned by a friend, he wanted to start over, to find something that used his mind and imagination. Meanwhile, he could at least control his own hours.
When the children were small, we fixed up a home in scraps of sleep-fogged so-called spare time between paid work and child care. New technologies meant that opportunities for flexible hours teaching from home were beginning to come my way. And I wrote, some days, only for twenty minutes, but even that felt good. The publishing industry was entering a time of huge upheaval and became increasingly focussed on bestsellers. I’d been despondent about the prospects for the kind of writing I wanted to do in this new reality. But as our relationship developed, desire and confidence returned. Having Richard and the children exposed parts of me I had not known existed. It enriched my writing, and on a mundane plane, babies taught me how to make good use of limited time. I rewrote my stalled sixth novel,
The Story of My Face, with my daughter napping beside my desk.
We were lucky to have found each other, to have conceived so easily. Both children were healthy. Our daughter had arrived after a lengthy labour with the cord looped around her neck. Three years later, our son, not to be outdone, sported five loops around his neck and emerged swiftly by emergency C-section. He suffered no ill effects. But it could have been otherwise.
We knew he would be our last and that it was time to settle into the shape of things to come, which in our case involved deciding to transplant ourselves to a different continent: from suburban London to one of the small islands that lie scattered between Victoria and Vancouver in the Salish Sea, somewhat shielded from the Pacific Ocean.
Richard, half Canadian, had family on the West Coast. My own family was complicated and sometimes fraught. (It eventually became the basis of my novel
Dear Evelyn.) I was one of three sisters, widely spaced in age: my eldest sister was seventeen years my senior and at sixteen had been mortified by the thought that if she pushed me in my pram, people would think I was hers. Our family began to scatter when I was still in elementary school, and my eldest sister and her husband immigrated to the USA. Now, my middle sister Jan (a mere twelve years my senior) and her husband were planning to follow their two daughters to New Zealand.
My relationship with my mother, difficult since adolescence, was still a challenge for both of us. The prospect of some distance did not alarm me. As for work, Richard would have space to set up a workshop and studio for the wooden furniture he intended to build to his own designs. I could write anywhere and pick up teaching work. We did not realize quite how much we had to
learn about the culture and history of the place we had moved to, and about ourselves too. But naive as we were, and as disastrous a move as this could have been, it worked out well. Along with much happiness, we have experienced the usual alarms, crises, losses, setbacks. Richard was eventually forced by some misshapen vertebrae and the demands of woodworking to abandon his custom furniture–making business and take on less satisfying work. He made the best of it, but I worried about him. Far from immune to fears and projections of disaster, I also worried about the education system, cellphones, children’s screen time, and the internet. About teenage peer groups and sexuality. About windstorms, droughts, heating oceans, forest fires—the climate crisis predicted for half a century now real, right here, combined with a total lack of action from governments—of that I was and continue to be terrified. But I had no concerns about my own health or strength, which I continued until my early sixties to take completely for granted.
Copyright © 2025 by Kathy Page. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
