Image here. Doug Mills/The New York Times
In “Clinton’s Sick Days” – a column in yesterday's New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s failure to disclose she has pneumonia before getting sick at New York’s 9/11 ceremony – Frank Bruni writes: “Her self-protection is a perverse form of self-destruction.”
While I would agree that she is a controlled and controlling woman – the result of having an open, philandering husband, the lack of power for women and her own Scorpio nature – that’s not what’s at play here. Or rather all that is at play here.
Women are raised to care for others. The not-so-subtle message is keep calm, carry on and don’t make a big deal of your cancer, recent surgery, etc. Lives are depending on you. (Whereas God forbid men have a hangnail: You’ll never hear the end of it.)
I knew a woman – the wife and receptionist of one of my doctors – who died recently in the prime of life from pneumonia. She just kept soldiering on. An office manager I know didn’t treat the spider bite she got caring for her mother’s grave until the infection was crawling up her arm.
I can remember my beloved Aunt Mary coming home from a partial hysterectomy and cooking for the family sitting down, bent over a grill, too shattered to stand. I myself worked for a company that was so insane about anyone being out of the office when it snowed – the time of year when people are often the sickest – that I went to work regardless of how ill I was. I even covered the turn of the millennium with a 103-degree fever. I couldn’t afford to be suspect. And I needed my sick days in case something happened to Aunt Mary or my mother.
That’s the reality for too many women: Others are depending on them.
In Clinton’s case, a whole nation.