Pain
A few weeks ago my left hip gave out. Maybe “gave out” isn’t the right term. A few weeks ago the pain I’ve been having on the right side of my back for about a year inexplicably moved itself, in its entirety to my left. It wasn’t the same kind of pain. It was sharp and involved nerves and all of a sudden I had a pronounced limp. Sitting was very hard, which made writing hard. Standing hurt after a few minutes. I finally understood why people say nerve pain is the worst. I’d wake in the night and it would feel like my leg was on fire. That’s not quite accurate. I would wake in the night and feel like having been set on fire and allowed to burn for awhile my lower leg was now being peeled to the bone with the same attention and care you would use to acquire a sliver of the finest parmesan.
I’m saying this in past tense because the pain is slightly better right now. I’ve started physical therapy and I’ve been seeing the acupuncturist. Today my acupuncturist said, “We can treat the pain or we can work into the foundation.” And then my physical therapist said, “I think you’ve had this issue for years and the pain is just bringing it to light.” Which is not so different from what Dr. Ng said in San Francisco to me all those years ago. “Very old,” he said. “Very old pain.” And then he smiled at me and meowed like a cat. Which was something he did a lot and always made sense at the time.
Even this early on in the story there’s the urge to somehow conflate this physical pain I’m in with the pain that ended my mother’s life. To say that having “very old pain” makes her story somehow more mine. What I have come to realize, as I’ve gotten older is one thing has nothing to do with the other. Or, perhaps it’s truer to say that my pain increases my sense of how impossible it must have been for her at the same time that I realize my pain, even if (please God no) it’s permanent, is not likely to undo me. My therapist said, “Your story is not her story.” And I got so mad. “It is my story,” I whined like a spoiled child. “It is.” “No,” she said. “You are part of her story and she is part of yours. You don’t get to be her story. Her story is hers. And your story is your own.”
What a crock. I fumed for days after she said that. It’s amazing how much I wanted to claim her story as mine. Or the opposite. When I wasn’t worrying how much like my mother I was, I was distancing myself. My new least favorite words in the world are, “I’m not crazy” but back then and until fairly recently I wore them like a merit badge and a talisman. My poor mother: poor, sick, suicidal. Not me. I was healthy enough to never be her. Which is to say I looked down on her without even knowing it. I walked around like my very own self-help book. Look at me being so much healthier than she was. What a fool I was. It makes me think of that Hayden poem:
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Because this poem is also not my mother’s story, it’s not perfectly analogous. For me it’s the first and third stanzas that get me thinking of our separate stories. What I like is that the father isn’t so much a hero as an ordinary person. This reminds me of my mother. Sure, I often have the impulse to make her into some kind of heroine. But really she was more than that. She was just like the rest of us in the basic ways. She got up in the mornings, mostly she could dress herself, she moved through her days without anyone showing her much gratitude. Certainly I rarely did. I’m trying to think now of the things I could have thanked her for: my blue eyes, my artistic nature, the way she didn’t fight for me to live with her so I didn’t have to live in close proximity to her illness. I didn’t thank her for the boom box she bought me with money she certainly barely had. Nor did I thank her the time she told me if I was ever in physical danger I could tell her and she would try to help me. For that offer I told her she was crazy.
Which must have been very painful for her, to have been told that. This morning I woke up with my new routine. I sat down and flossed the nerve in my left calf, then I lay down and did some stretches, I moved on to strength work, and then I lay in savasana like Hoa suggested I do for twenty minutes a day. I repeat this, or some variant of this, every few hours in an effort to get better and mainly to keep the pain away. I’m thinking right now how it’s sort of like the father lighting the fire in the morning. I get up aching and slowly I get the heat going inside myself, which makes the whole house warmer since I’m no good to anyone laying in bed all day feeling angry at the pain. Or hobbling around the house snapping at anyone who asks me to lift a plate or clean the cat box. Oh! That makes my partner like the speaker of the poem. Now she’s the speaker and I’m the father, when at the beginning of this piece I was the son and my mother was the father.
Which is to say we are both and neither. Perhaps I am overworking this point. But it’s something I think about a lot in terms of suicide and literature and now this pain. On one hand, I hurt and mother hurt. And many people say all pain is essentially equal. There are many people who would argue that my mother shouldn’t have killed herself because she knew that in doing so she would hurt me and perhaps many others. Which seems to me another way of saying how dare she think her pain was worse than other people’s. I told that to my therapist one day. I was sitting on the couch hugging a pillow and I said, “I know that all pain is equal. That no one’s pain is worse than anyone else’s.” To which she replied, “There’s a hierarchy.” In the moment I thought she was saying my pain was worse than lots of people’s but now I think it was more nuanced than that. I think back on the conversation now and think she was talking as much about my mother as she was talking about me. I was in terrible pain. My whole self was the block of Parmesan being peeled (what a horrible metaphor this is). I was also alive and sitting on the couch being capable of being alive. And I wasn’t thinking about my mother at all. Even as I spoke about going crazy “just like her” and dying “just like her,” I wasn’t really thinking about her or caring about her. I was making a story of it in which I was the hero. I’m not diminishing the amount of pain I was in but distance has allowed me to see that during the time I was most insistent on being like my mother she was most profoundly a stranger to me.
What did I know? Not much back then. Not about her. To say that she should have stayed alive to have spared me pain is to assume I understood not merely the depth of her pain but the extent of her options. Today I will get up from my spot on the floor and drive to the place where I do P.T. It will hurt but it will be a good kind of hurt. I’ll sit in traction for ten minutes while the physical therapists show people photos of their dogs. Everyone who has a dog will start talking about their dogs. I’ll think, “Gosh, I wish I had a dog.” I’d like a greyhound named Cleveland. I’d like to put him in a cardigan. Sometimes I imagine Cleveland and I walking down the street together or just sitting at a café. I tell people who ask about how I rescued him from the racetrack. Back home I build him a fire to lie in front of.
Then I start to feel the traction harness release. I walk out past the folks sitting at the occupational therapy table relearning how to cut their food. I sit in the car for a little while before driving back home to my cats and my partner who asks me how it went. “Great,” I’ll say. “I feel a lot better.”
