The Language of Water: A Woman's Struggle with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Jude Clarke was 21 years old when diagnosed with systemic lupus
erythematosus, an auto-immune disease named from the Latin word for
wolf. She did not expect to live long. Almost 30 years later, she still
works as an artist and still lives with what she calls her wolf.

Part 1 of her story relates how she learned to cope with a disease that
flares up every few years with such a ferocious attack on her body that
she must take medication that itself causes problems. Even when she is
not in the flame of a flare, she experiences unutterable fatigue and
extreme sun sensitivity. Yet through it all she has been blessed with a
close family, a loving husband, and her own determination to continue to
create her art.

Part 2 opens with a year in Strasbourg, where her husband is on a
sabbatical. She paints in good health, discovers watercolour to be her
medium, and happily realizes that she has left her worrywart self in
Canada. At the same time, the reader begins to enjoy her limpid
descriptions of what she sees as she looks on everything with a
painterly eye. On another sabbatical in Scotland, she finds a landscape
that inspires her to include all that she sees in her paintings, even
“to catch the rhythm of the wind.”

In this collage memoir, Clarke’s searing accounts of her pain and
occasional despair are cushioned by childhood memories, a few of her
husband’s poems, her adventures in travel and in teaching art to
children, brief images of her wolf, the explorations in her painting,
and 19 illustrations of her work that provide an intriguing counterpoint
to her graceful words.

The wolf, which once tore at its own heart, becomes a more benign
figure by the end of the tale. And Jude Clarke has found some peace. She
now accepts that her wolf will never go away but feels this realization
as the letting go of a weight in her life. Finally, she has lost her
fear of her wolf.