Skip to main content

Pain and Love

I know a couple of people who suffer from chronic pain. Back when it started, family and friends had an abundance of concern and compassion but over the decades that wore out to nothing. One of them is my aunt S. Her world grew smaller as the years passed until she is confined to her bedroom now. 

If anyone ever doubted how deeply my uncle loves her, they just need to see that he is the only person left in the world that feels her pain alongside her every day. It did not grow old and routine for him, did not morph into a source of annoyance. He knows where she hurts and how, what makes her comfortable and what does not. While the rest of the world has moved on from S, he has not - he is easing her troubles every day. Reading this essay about losing the ability to walk when already constrained by chronic pain reminded me of my aunt. This description about the onset of sudden and inexplicable pain is very sad to read

First off, the pain bears no relation to how you feel when you’re doing a thing. Swimming might feel great – so floaty, what could go wrong – but watch out for kryptonite later in the week. Detached from its immediate cause, pain is perplexing – like being on the receiving end of an irrational outburst of anger from someone you love.

In my aunt's life the pain may be irrational but she is lucky to have real love. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more