To learn what suffering has to teach requires that we protect the time and space we need to regard, reflect, and pray. Suffering calls us one by one to walk a dark valley. As Flannery O\u2019Connor suggests, “\u201d\u00a6 sickness is . . . a place where there\u2019s no company, where nobody can follow\u201d\u009d (163). To speak from that place of exile is to forego the clich\u00c3\u00a9s and enter into what Marianne Paget called a \u201ccomplex sorrow.\u201d\u009d In her \u201cMastectomy Poems\u201d\u009d Alicia Ostriker issues a practical corrective to those who dramatize her suffering in a way that would belie the daily experience of life-threatening illness:<\/p>\n
Spare me your pity,<\/p>\n
your terror, your condolence.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not your wasting heroine,<\/p>\n
your dying swan. Friend, tragedy<\/p>\n
is a sort of surrender.<\/p>\n
Tell me again I\u2019m a model<\/p>\n
of toughness. I eat that up.<\/p>\n
I grade papers, I listen to wind. (93)<\/p>\n
Ostriker\u2019s spunky resistance to stereotypes calls to mind the comment of an Auschwitz survivor I know: To call the Holocaust a \u201ctragedy,\u201d\u009d she insisted, is to falsify it and to oversimplify the mystery of the evil that took place. Tragedy is an art form in which the hero \u201csuffers into truth.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n