Writing Out the Pain
February 7th, 2010
Into every life, pain must come. It may come from any number of sources: from loss, from betrayal, even from growth. Regardless of where it originates, the general outlines of the experience are universal. Foremost, we feel what we recognize as emotional pain. Heartache settles on us like a heaviness that we can’t shrug off, that no amount of cheerful banter or amusing distractions can unseat. Our expressions remain blank, our eyes reflect a kind of lifeless dullness, in conversation, our voices lack sparkle. Although there are many similarities, pain is not the same as clinical depression. Unlike depression, emotional pain has a recognizable source. We can pinpoint why and where we are hurting.
Whether or not we recognize it, each of us constitutes an organic whole. We can’t somehow separate out our emotional pain from our physical being, our mental acuity, and our spiritual focus. When painful emotions overtake us, we can expect to experience physical discomfort (that ‘heartache’ again), mental dullness or confusion, and spiritual aridity. The entirety of our personhood goes into retreat from a condition we might call ‘feelings deprivation.’ Pain is big. It’s so big that it fills our inner space to the breaking point. It leaves no room for anything else. Ordinarily, we have room for many emotions at the same time: joy, excitement, anticipation, intimacy can all together share the same emotional space and still leave room for more, like anxiety or fear. Not so with pain. When it settles in, there’s no room left for any other feelings. We are joy-deprived. What can we do then?
I drive a red 1994 Jeep Wrangler that I bought brand new. It has sat outside in all kinds of weather for the past sixteen years. Last week, I noticed with some annoyance that one of the tires was losing air . . . again. Last time, it was the left front. Now, it’s the right front. I was tempted to blame my repair place, because I’ve been bringing it back there with the same complaint a number of times. This time, when I picked the car up, I asked, “Why do the tires keep losing air?” The receptionist told me, “Oh, the wheels are pretty corroded and we had to clean them up and apply some special sealant.” I recognized that it was my seemingly-benign neglect that had been the trouble all along. The rust and corrosion is gradually eating up not only the wheels, but the bumpers and some of the body as well. Is the fate of the whole vehicle in question?
Earlier today, a friend told me (and I don’t know for certain whether or not he’s correct) that the Greeks have a saying for when a young couple has their first wall-shaking shout-fest. The bemused neighbors comment, “They’re learning to love each other.” It’s the rare couple (none that I know of) who has never raised their voices at each other. I will say this, though: if a couple is ever going to do verbal battle, it’s going to be at midlife. Healthy couples never stop “learning to love each other.” For those that do stop, they eventually discover that they’ve grown apart, seem to have little left in common, and it’s the perfect time for one of them to drop the “love bomb” — you know the one: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”
Ever since people were able to distinguish the idea of ‘I’ from the idea of ‘my’, they’ve been asking the question, ‘why?’ In a hundred million different ways, people ask, “Why am I here?” For as long as I remember, that question (in its myriad of different forms) has sometimes boggled, sometimes driven, but always infused my conscious reflection. When I was just an adolescent, a therapist once commented to me that (in his words) I was “obsessed with the truth.” His appreciation of what was really going on was close to the mark (maybe as close as my adolescent powers of expression could take him): my true obsession has always been with meaning. I am one of those intellectually driven dudes who absorbs all the ‘why’ questions that people constantly throw at the universe and I remake them, refined and condensed, into one great challenge to All That Is: “What is the meaning of life?” Oddly, there’s nothing rhetorical about me. I actually expect an answer.
I want to begin my article series for 2010 with the seemingly incongruous topic of ‘death’ for a number of very good reasons, the first of which would be having experienced the unexpected death of a favorite aunt only a few days ago on New Year’s eve. We certainly had not planned on ringing in a new decade with the rituals of mourning. However, life’s vagrancies pay no attention to our expectations. Not ever. Yet, as a culture, we seem to be obsessed with the denial of death. We’ve even changed our language so that we don’t even have to use the word ‘death.’ Nobody dies anymore; they just ‘pass away.’ After all, isn’t ‘death’ such a morbid subject? We wouldn’t want to be accused of having a morbid fascination, would we? So, our culture attempts to expunge death from our lives by hiding it under platitudes and insulating us from it as much as possible by hiding (or hiding from) the evidence.
