AIDS Memoirs
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means of attaining spiritual growth and enlightenment. Matousek writes:
No matter how I wanted the disease gone and the epidemic over, I
could not deny the good that had come from my infection ... I was learning
that responses to fate’s extreme truths are necessarily complex; that the
worst times are sometimes also the best; that beauty can root in the ugliest
misfortune...(181)
The memoirist comes to the conclusion that if suffering is deemed a redemptive
experience, then cynicism, bitterness, and depression are kept at bay.
Matousek’s memoir eschews the stages approach to the dying process as
enunciated by Kubler-Ross, reflecting instead Corr’s holistic, task-based approach
that allows a patient like Matousek to concentrate on his spiritual needs. Matousek
believed that spiritual enlightenment would ease both the physical and psychological
torment he faced as his disease progressed, as well as give him and his family and
friends a measure of hope for a future filled with life-threatening obstacles. In fact,
Corr points out that a task-based approach to dying encompasses the whole of an
individual’s life and is not confined merely to the terminally ill person. He states
that it applies to all individuals who are drawn into the experience of dying: the
dying person, family, friends, and care-givers. Corr adds:
A task-based approach explicitly recognize s the w illingness or
unwillingness of each coping individual to take part in a caring community.
All of these people are, or can be, individuals who are coping with dying.
This sharing in the lives and tasks of others is an unavoidable feature of
coping with dying.” (91)
A major catalyst in Matousek’s quest for spiritual enlightenment was the
guidance of an East Indian guru named Mother Meera, who taught Matousek to
stop looking outside of himself for answers to life’s perplexing questions and instead
“be still and listen to the voice of my own soul, trusting that I was in good hands”
(258). For Matousek, ultimately enlightenment resided not in words such as
“divine,” “God,” or “spirit,” but in simply appreciating the here, the now, and the
interconntection of all things in nature and human life. He adds with childlike
wonder:
What could all this be but divine?...What could I have imagined this
earth to be but a wholly splendid miracle? I saw how deluded I’d been not
to see what was right in front of my eyes; that all things in creation were
holy, even the ugly, violent, and incomprehensible. What had once