“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)

Eros and illness are abstract terms, with widely differing definitions, but equally undefined and unexpected they broke into my life as anything but abstractions.  I belong to the growing number of family members suddenly thrust into the role of caregivers: spouses, siblings, adult children looking after elderly parents, even (as in AIDS-devastated Africa) exhausted grandparents or overwhelmed teenagers left to care for disease-orphaned children.