The hardest part of being ill this long is not the illness, it is that people stopped checking in. How do I handle feeling forgotten?

“My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off.”

David describes friends and family standing at a distance from his affliction. He is not describing cruelty, he is describing what long illness does to a circle of people over time. They do not know what to say, so they say nothing, and the gap quietly widens. That this made it into Israel's songbook means the loneliness of prolonged sickness is neither new nor shameful to admit.

“And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.”

At the pool of Bethesda a man had been ill for thirty eight years. When Jesus asks whether he wants to be made whole, his answer is not yes. He says he has no one to help him into the water. His deepest grievance was not the illness itself but having nobody, and Jesus does not hurry past that sentence before responding to him.