In the wake of a bereavement, Ruth Moore describes how she felt a new kinship with the patients she cares for who live with chronic pain<\/p>\n
\u201cNow is the start of the chronic phase.\u201d This comment from a friend shortly after our baby son\u2019s funeral grabbed my attention. As an anaesthetist, I appreciate the instant drug to effect gratification of anaesthesia for half of my working week. Yet pain medicine is my niche\u2014specifically, the chronic, awkward pain that refuses to go away.<\/span><\/p>\n My clinic is filled with people who suffer in ways that are inconvenient to conventional medicine. They experience disparate pains that will not be boxed neatly inside a unifying diagnosis. Pain that comes with the kind of baggage it makes any attempts to cling to tidy Cartesian dualism seem<\/span> delusional. I hope that my interactions with people facing such circumstances have been empathetic before now, although only they can judge. Faced with the chronic pain of grief for a child, I feel a new kinship with them.<\/span><\/p>\n Pain and grief are ugly things. We do not want them around because they make us afraid. We like to be in control, and loss and pain remind us that we never were. They blow apart our modern fantasy that successful living resides entirely in comfort and happiness. <\/span>When this facade is shattered, difficult existential questions arise. These struggles and the questions they force upon us are most obvious among the dying: what does life mean in light of imminent death? What constitutes a \u201cgood\u201d death, or a good life? How much will it hurt?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In chronic pain, the questions have a different flavour\u2014one which more closely resembles the experience of those left behind, the bereaved ones. How do I continue to live this life I would never have chosen for myself? It really does hurt. Is it possible to make peace with a pain that has no obvious endpoint?<\/span><\/p>\n I have heard people in persistent pain express the desire<\/span> to be able to put down their pain, or let someone else shoulder the burden, if only for a while. How I wish that were possible with grief. Both experiences are isolating. The desire to reach out to others for comfort is matched by overwhelming loneliness. At times, it feels like no one can reach me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are flare ups with grief, as with chronic pain. Some are predictable\u2014a due date, an anniversary, an occasion that should be happy but now is not. These clouds gather visibly on the horizon\u2014at least offering the opportunity to take shelter, to try to mitigate the blow. At other times they come out of a clear blue sky. We carry the weight around with us every day. On some days we are more equal to it than on others.<\/span><\/p>\n Hearing other people\u2019s stories can be helpful. But as time passes, I am aware that there is a choice to make. It can be tempting to nurse grief, or pain, in an attempt to retain a connection with what has been lost. An identity can be found there, but it is one that is defined by loss. The journey from there to disabling bitterness is a short one. Instead, can I choose to integrate the loss into the larger story of my life, and to build more layers of experience around it, which may insulate it a little in time?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our culture does not deal well with pain. We are privileged to live in a society where diverse worldviews and faiths can be held freely. Yet<\/span> we discuss them so rarely, when all is well in our private world, that in moments of shattering loss there is a risk that the fragile illusion of unity will break. We experienced, for example, the acute discomfort of those caring for our son when confronted with our faith. As a consequence, we have no social protocol for serious illness or death, and no shared paradigm. A Kurdish friend, on visiting us shortly after our son\u2019s death, commented on the discomfort he felt on his first encounter with such a situation in British culture. We congratulated him on having become thoroughly enculturated\u2014it\u2019s always awkward, no one ever knows what to say. We simply appreciated the fact that he came.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n