No Why in Pain

I started writing this essay when I stumbled across a statistic. Today in America you’re more likely to die of an opioid overdose than in a car crash. Opioids on the prescription end of the spectrum are morphine, hydrocodone, and the ones that demand their own trademark like OxyContin®. On the un-prescribed end of the spectrum, opioids look like heroin. The drug attaches to certain receptor sites in the brain, numbing your ability to feel pain and (usually) pleasure simultaneously. Opioids are human’s most effective weapons for silencing the world. And the world has become so loud.

“The tragedy that is built-in to real life, never ceases to shock us, break us, and send us into each other’s arms.”

So anyway, when I started this essay, I didn’t start by thinking about pain. (Because, obvs) I began (as you do) by having pithy thoughts about kudos for cars and their ability to wrap us in straps and bubble wrap and have full frontal crunch zones. I’ve been in a head-on car crash and survived to tell the tale, so I know a little about such things. But then, in the space where the blank page of an unfinished essay stares at you, someone I knew died in a car crash. He was 32 and had three children. The tragedy that is built-in to real life, never ceases to shock us, break us, and send us into each other’s arms.

The truth in tragedy puts the facts in statistics to shame.

Some other things happened too. I decided to post the opioid statistic on Facebook—the arbiter of truth—with one brief comment: “we need to have a conversation about pain.” Multiple friend commented on that post, people who’s stories I knew and to be honest, some who I’d forgotten how deep their pain goes. We do that—don’t we. We get pain amnesia about each other. I notice it in how friends treat me. I want them to remember that I didn’t bounce back as well as I’m trying to look. But because I, like you, am pretty good at helping you forget the pain I’ve seen. We all are coerced into moving on.

But the most urgent pain in my world has been a community wrestling with the loss of life too soon. Living in a community of people facing deep tragedy, you hear people say a lot of things, some very cringeworthy. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. The ones where under the weight of a sorrow we can’t even name we are given seven-steps to moving forward, volumes of unsolicited advice of how to grieve right, trite one-liners (particularly of the religious variety) about how a good theology will numb the pain. Because faith-people aren’t allowed to publicly be drug or alcohol addicts, we often have to use our out-of-context Bible verses to do a similar work… to silence the noise in our heads, to get numb the scream we can’t seem to release from our chest, to get about the business of getting back to business, whatever our business may be. Religious one-liners, when taken in the right doses often enough are terribly good at silencing the world. And the world has become so loud.

The Thrill of Moving On

For obvious reasons, I—like you—am very interested in getting past pain. The next thing is awesome. The next challenge, the next dream, the next proof-of-concept for our well-designed life. Even better than moving on is moving up, and I know a little of this too. I recently resigned from a company I worked with for 13 years. I’ve been overwhelmed by the kind notes, social media messages and voicemails I received from many. For a period of time I left a quiet space in myself and in public about what I would do next. Quiet spaces are so easily filled with noise.

The space where my work had once been filled with expectation, (some generous) like, “I’m sure your next thing will be bigger and better than your last.” Or “I know we will all be amazed by what you do next.” These comments are all well-intended (I hope) and as such, well-received. But in places where we tell each other the truth, other things must be said.

Next things are not always bigger.

And bigger is not always better.

“We may be done with the events which caused the pain, but the soreness and the suffering are almost always still hanging about the living room.”

And the work of amazing other people has cost me more in pain then I knew I could bear so please, dear God in heaven, don’t ask me to amaze everyone again.

Moving on can be its own pain, or—more likely—a continuation of the last. Your mind, the quickest moving thing in the human constitution, rushes ahead to dreams, plans, do-betters, and new definitions. Our mind, which has the shortest connection to our mouth, finds ways to tell everyone else about how much better we intend to be and do. While waiting still in our lungs, is that scream of unfinished pain that will not yet come.

We may be done with the events which caused the pain, but the soreness and the suffering are almost always still hanging about the living room.

Our bodies—arms, toes, backs, lungs—the things that hug, help, hold hands, have sex and hang on to pain longer than we’d like, are the real storytellers. One out of every five people you know deals with what is now called “chronic pain” where the body aches, cries, hungers in all kinds of inexplicable places and ways, with no solution in sight. Chronic pain befuddles Western medicine. Four hundred tests and pokes later, the source is often not to be found. We cannot dissect or surgery or pharmacology our way to a solution. The pain is the truth that statistical facts can’t silence.

The body, as it has been said, keeps the score. It keeps it by that tightness in the chest when we wake up, that ache of emptiness when we sleep alone in our once two-person beds. The tingle in our fingers we can’t explain, the tension from lower back and hipthat no amount of chiropracting can relieve. For many people, years after we’ve talked ourselves out of the mental pain, told ourselves the stories lie permanently in the past, done all our moving on, a piece of the pain carries with us still.

This cellular holding-on to the stories we’d prefer to have let go, can be an unforgiving hag. The tension and inflammation we feel from suffering’s unfinished screams hold themselves inside us, demanding an anesthesiologist, a drink, a promotion at work, the praise of a few raving fans. If up-and-to-the-right is the divine line of our lives, then we don’t have time for the circular notion pain demands of us. It keeps taking us back, reminding us of Chapter 6, when we’re trying to write Chapter 19. The pain of our past, whether memories we can’t forget, smells that hold us in their sway, physical pain that won’t let go, is our best reminder that the American dream of straight lines is a high gloss prison. Perhaps circles, an ever-drawing into our center and out toward each other, is truly where we belong.

The Expertise of Grief

My father died when he was in his early 50s from complications of cancer. At the time of his death, I had already read extensively about grief, studied under spiritual directors, seen therapists for other woes from my past, so I felt myself an expert on this business of going through pain. That and being 29. We are all experts at 29. A decade ago now, I can still feel myself in every hospital room of that miserable adventure. I remember smells and linoleum. I remember the wallpaper border of the hospice facility housing octogenarians and my father in his supposed prime.

The nurses found a sickening optimism in the fact that “his body is so young it just doesn’t want to let go.” This was after a colon that had burst, a liver 2/3 removed, and a body-cavity filled with septic toxins, body scans covered in leopard spots of malignancy. Everyone knew he was going to die, it was just a matter of when. My mom and I had made the decision to take him off the pain medication and move to hospice after the “we’ve tried everything” conversation. I was the one who closed his eyes for the last time, just a few dozen short hours after I prayed to God would give my dad the courage to die.

“ It’s such a stupid thing to say really, to assume that death is the option when because we haven’t gotten the life we wanted. But we say these things in pain, because we don’t know what else to say.”

I did all the right things. Cried when I felt like it. Wrote my feelings out. Reached out to friends. Told stories about my dad, listened to dozens more. I tried to face each day with the courage all my good grief books had told me was required. I didn’t attempt to put on a happy face. I did all the good work of moving on, but pain was still in the living room.

Months after his death, I was sitting on my couch reading, my wife putting our one-year-old first baby into bed. The scream, the one trapped in the chest, finally was ready to come. Flashing through my brain over and over was the moment I had told the nurse to stop the pain medication. The moment she told me that he could hold on a long time because of how young he was. The moment I told her it didn’t matter because this wasn’t the life he wanted. It’s such a stupid thing to say really, to assume that death is the option when because we haven’t gotten the life we wanted. But we say these things in pain, because we don’t know what else to say. Our brain and that quick connection to our mouth, leaving the truth of our bodies behind.

Back in my living room, I started sobbing uncontrollably. Big guttural snot-waterfall inducing sobs. I was heaving and crying out so loudly that Wendy quickly came down the stairs to find out what was wrong. The logic of my brain turned off, the truth of my wounds could finally cry out, “I murdered him. I killed him. He should have lived, but it was me that killed him.”

Understand, even in that moment, I knew this wasn’t factual. Understand, it took months for my body to be able to speak its truth loudly enough to bypass my calculating mind. Pain, the pain we hold on to and the pain which holds us, isn’t interested in facts. It is interested in the extreme subjectivity of truth. I felt like a killer. I was angry for having to make a decision I didn’t want to make. I was overrun with sadness at how much I carried my father to his grave. The facts will say that I did nothing wrong and that there were only minor variations of how the story could have played out. Books store facts, bodies don’t.

From the moment my dad died, I felt I carried in my skin the leftovers of his too-short life. The last hug I ever gave him was to lift him out of his chair and drag his 250 lb emaciated form through the hallway to take him to the hospital for the last time. That weight of his unfinished life-crushing down on mine pressed into my skin. And this carried on for years.

My “expertise” in grief had not made it manageable, not given it a reason. Grief is always the expert of us, not the other way around. There is no moral high-ground in suffering (despite what your Calvinist friends might say), but grief is one of our best teachers if we are willing to listen. And grief’s way of circling us back to the stories we’ve tried to “move-on” from, is the gift that ought never let us go.

Welcome Pain

“Only the most dangerous of dreams seek to divorce us from where we’ve been.”

Contrary to the self-help gurus who make millions lying to, we don’t get to choose our stories. The illusion of humans as self-actualized achievers climbing through life in a straight line from the lower left quadrant to the upper right is a flagrant fantasy. Our lives happen in circles, sometimes unwelcome ones, where we are constantly coming back to the past, rediscovering its riches, in order to connect, love, imagine and grow.

Only the most dangerous of dreams seek to divorce us from where we’ve been. The sermons of fascists and egomaniacs call us to forward, only forward. What pain teaches us is not its causes nor its resolutions, but its truth—the truth that who we are is inexplicably attached to where we’ve been.

Too much religion and too much self-help have taught us to find a “why” in pain. Like a hidden latch holding a door closed we believe that knowing some cause, some reason behind the suffering will bring us freedom. It won’t. Pain comes to us an all-too-regular unwelcome visitor, demanding our attention, drawing us into the simple now, with all its annoying sufferings.

“Why” is a line-shaped question. Taking the point we are at, it seeks to draw an arrow back to the thing that caused it. This is useful in simplified situations. But pain is complex. Infinitely complex. And you can’t draw a straight line through a complex system. But you can draw a circle around it. You can lap it, over and over, as long as you need to, in order to see it, ask questions of it, observe it, love the person you are in it and the people in it with you. We will never find God in the why. But we will find him in the who.

“Who” is a circle-shaped question. It gives us the courage to look around, look within without judgment. Instead of looking for answers, we look for people. Who can I be honest about my fear with? Who is holding me as I weep? Who is walking with me when I cannot stand? When the inevitable loneliness that comes with pain rears its head, who can I invite into this moment? And, one day, who has my pain taught me to love?

The invitation of pain is to widen the circle. To radically include all that we’ve wished to ignore. To include the stories we’d dare not tell, the facts that scare us, the people whose rejections we shudder to feel. This is true, too, of God. When we expect God, like a scientist, to give us the one linear “Why” to our pain, we exclude Him from the “Who.” So busy paying Him off as the private detective to track down our oppressors, we send Him away until He can come back with satisfactory answers. When, of course, (you have guessed it by now) God, most often found in the faces of His people, is the ultimate Who. The One who fills everything in every way. When we widen our circle for the pains we are running from, we widen it too for the One who knows pain the best.

My challenge, and maybe yours, too, in facing years of pain both physical and emotional, is to live with a stance of welcome. With a quick strategic mind, I’ve spent so much of my life searching for “whys.” My brain racing ahead while my body, and the pain it carries waiting behind. But, in these recent years, as I’ve allowed pain to be welcome here, I’ve found that it brings friends with it. It is on early mornings like this, where I finally finish essays that have had to be ripped out of me, I can say, Welcome pain. Welcome to the party. And welcome suffering God who knows my pains better than me. And standing in this circle of welcome we can face the world, with whatever joy or suffering or noise it may bring… together.