This last week, I’ve experienced flashbacks to moments I’d rather not remember––Walking waist-bent to the car, unable to straighten my torso, sciatic fire slicing down my legs. Three hours sitting in a wheelchair outside the ER, barely able to stand and throbbing from the pain of sitting. Sleepless hours alone in the hospital, not knowing whether, when, or what type of surgery I was waiting to have. The reflection of my own solemn face in a black window as a nurse wheeled my gurney back to my room after a midnight MRI.
I suppress these memories because I don’t want to share them with myself, let alone with anyone else. Pain is difficult to encounter alone, but sometimes it can be even more difficult to share. We long to spare others of the pain our pain brings them––and we long to avoid, just as fully, the feeling of being pitied. Something vital gets lost somewhere in the bouncing back and forth between the telling of pain, the expressions of sorrow from others, and then your own sorrow at others’ sorrow on your behalf.
“Pain,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “has an element of Blank.” The wisdom of this sentence goes even deeper, I think, than the remainder of that short poem where she describes the eternal circuity of Pain (how It blots out your memories to convince you that It is all you’ve ever known; how It saturates your dreams until they resemble its own emptiness). As it bounces back and forth between us in our expressions of pain and sorrow, the Blank of Pain can make the threads of connection that bind us to each other and to the world seem to fade.
Subjects like this are difficult to discuss because we don’t share a framework for understanding them. To one, our earthly pains are temporary trials we must endure on our way to some long-at-last eternity where God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. To another, the pain of the body is like a rubik's cube, some complex problem that could be solved with the right steps, and they merely need to share with the sufferer the steps they themselves have figured out so far. To others still, pain has no answer at all, and the subject just leaves them feeling deflated and sad until something else can be found to distract the mind.
To me, pain is best understood as an eraser that’s determined to wipe away the web of lines that connect us to each other and to the world. I think the best way to fight Pain, both in ourselves and in others, is to take up arms against its Blank––to retrace the vital connection points between each other and the world over and over until they’re etched more deeply inside of us than pain can even go.
Until next week,
Josh