Pain

When sobbing, there is a point that you reach where you stop breathing. Like holding a note while singing, the sob stays frozen in your mouth and heart for an untold period of time while your heart continues to beat and your mouth is open, perhaps emitting a small whining noise, but you have ceased breathing. You remain, alive and un-alive, in this space between sobs until eventually instinct kicks in, and you gasp for breath, only to repeat the experience.

It is this space between breathless sobs that I want to discuss. You only reach this point in sobbing when the pain has reached a pitch where words are meaningless, thoughts a tumbling profusion of images, sounds, and sensations, and living in your body and your mind has become, for the moment, absolutely unbearable. When the pain is this acute, there is no remedy. Like being sucked under by a riptide, you are at its mercy until it releases you. Memory and will are at war within your brain, resulting in a living torture that, while it remains, causes you to be sure you will not survive it.

You stop breathing in this level of sobbing because the pain is simply too much. It is almost as though each of these sobs is a little suicide. The sheer power of the pain is so overwhelming, so encompassing, that it feels fatal. And like in death, your brain releases chemicals during this level of crying that allow you to remain there with a borderline pleasurable sensation. It is perhaps the utter abandonment of your brain and your body to this pain that causes these chemicals to be released, as though surrendering to the poignant despair of it all will bring you to a different kind of freedom.

In this space, I wish I was dead. I wish for my life to be over, and I cannot see any way in which it is reasonable or possible for me to continue. When I cry like this, I am sure I cannot survive it, and moment by moment, I am continually surprised to find myself alive at the end of it. It is as though I’ve been thrown into a volcano, and when I come out alive, I cannot fathom how it is that my brain and body have not melted in the heat and trauma of the magma.

If there are such things as demons, I wonder if they revel in these moments where you surrender to a pain that is so much bigger than you, it has swallowed you whole. Do demons dance in glee when you enter that space where some level of insidious pleasure has entered the pain? Is it their voices that are whispering to you that the dark maw of despair is the only way out of the torment? That in finally releasing yourself to the fullness of the pain, you have forsaken all hope of coming back from it?

But then the sobbing quiets, and you do come back from it. So, in the end, are demons and pain no more than shadows and wind?

I lay claim to nothing more than pondering, perhaps wasting my time and yours in the process. All I know is that when I relive the final days of Lizzy’s life, I sob like this. I reach points of such despair, that I am surprised to find that I live through it. And having lived through it, I have no idea what life without Lizzy means–what life carrying this amount of pain and grief can ever amount to.

All I know is that the space between those sobs is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes silent, sometimes beckoning me to stay there, because remaining in a place of such total despair is maybe the only logical reaction to the loss of Lizzy.