When My Wife Got MS: What Buddhism Taught Us About Illness

There are moments in a life when everything you believe gets tested. Not in a philosophical way — in a very concrete, 3 a.m., what-do-we-do-now way.

My wife's multiple sclerosis diagnosis was one of those moments.

I'm not going to pretend that Buddhism made it easy. It didn't. Nothing makes something like that easy. But I can say, honestly, that the practice gave us something to hold onto when the ground shifted.

MS is a disease that announces itself and then keeps renegotiating the terms. Some days are fine. Some days are not. The uncertainty is its own kind of burden — you can't plan around it, can't predict it, can't outthink it.

When the diagnosis came, my first instinct was to fix it. That's who I am. I research, I problem-solve, I find the expert, I make the plan. And there's a place for all of that. We did all of that.

But there's a limit to what fixing can do. And at that limit, you have to find another way to be.

Buddhism teaches that illness is one of the four sufferings — birth, aging, illness, and death — that are inherent to human life. Not as punishment. Not as failure. As fact.

That framing helped me. Not because it made the illness acceptable, but because it removed the question of why. Why us? Why now? Why her? Those questions, I've learned, are mostly traps. They keep you stuck in a story about unfairness instead of engaged with the reality in front of you.

The practice kept asking: what is the cause you're setting right now? What are you doing with this moment? Not the moment you wish you were in — this one.

Caregiving is not a dramatic thing. It's a daily thing. It's the small adjustments, the logistics, the learning to ask for help and to give it without resentment. It's the conversations you have to keep having. It's the grief that comes in waves, not all at once.

I've learned things about my wife through this that I couldn't have learned any other way. Her courage. Her humor in the face of things that would flatten most people. Her refusal to be defined by what she can't do.

And I've learned things about myself — some of them flattering, some of them not. The practice has been useful here too. It keeps asking me to be honest about what I'm feeling, even when what I'm feeling is fear or frustration or grief.

People ask sometimes what keeps a marriage together through something like this. I don't have a formula. But I have some observations.

Honesty helps. Not brutal honesty — kind honesty. The willingness to say what's actually happening instead of performing fine-ness for each other.

Humor helps. This is something I'll write more about in another post, but my wife and I have laughed our way through some genuinely terrible situations. Not because they weren't terrible, but because laughter is a form of defiance, and defiance is a form of hope.

And the practice helps. Not because it provides answers, but because it provides a structure. Twice a day, we sit down and chant. We show up. We say: we're still here. We're still paying attention. We're still in this together.

That's not nothing. After all these years, I'd say it's everything.

This post is adapted from themes in my book Fifty Years of Buddhist Practice, available to read free as a flipbook. No sign-up required.