The Subjectivity of Pain
On April 16, 1879, St. Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes died at age 35. She was always a sickly child, barely surviving the cholera epidemic of 1855 and suffering from asthma all throughout her short life. Towards the end, she developed tuberculosis, culminating in a tubercular tumor on her right knee. According to the nuns who lived and prayed with her, she never spoke a word of complaint or pain, causing the doctors to discover too late that she was dying. When asked if she would take the healing waters of Lourdes, St. Bernadette said that the waters were not meant for her.
Considering that more than 67 documented cures at Lourdes have been accepted by the Church, it seems strange indeed that God would not cure the woman, who, as a child, was the instrument used to initially dig the miraculous springs of healing. Why was St. Bernadette so sure that the water was not for her, and what sort of strength did it take to die slowly from tuberculosis without uttering one word of complaint?
When I was twenty years old, my best friend and I took the long train trip through mainland France to visit the sanctuary at Lourdes. I mostly remember overwhelming green, towering stone, water dripping slowly from the lichen-covered walls of the grotto, the smell of thousands of candles burning in supplication, and sobbing through one of the most amazing confessions of my life. I have yet to experience a comparable level of the overwhelming sense of peace and prayer that I encountered in that place. Back then, I didn’t know how St. Bernadette died or that I would one day give birth to a little saint who would also die too soon, despite receiving Anointing of the Sick administered with water from the Lourdes Grotto. I had no way of knowing that I would give birth a month later to a blind infant who may one day be the reason I return to Lourdes to petition God for the healing and restoration of her blue eyes and broken kidneys.
I have been thinking a great deal this past week about the subjectivity of love. For those who loved her, Lizzy’s death caused the entire world to stop. I remember my big sister coming home from finally visiting her work over a month later and remarking how strange it was that everything outside of our home had just kept on going. By our logic at the time, the world should have ended; I should have died; all should have turned to dust, ash, and smoke. And yet, no such thing happened because our love, and therefore our pain, was purely subjective.
I have struggled with this idea since the early days of my grief: how can the life of a two-year-old who the vast majority of humanity never knew existed matter so much that her death should have stopped life itself? How do I cope with the conviction that Lizzy’s story is the most important story I will ever tell, perhaps even the story that I was born to tell? What was it exactly that mattered so much–that still matters so much–about her little life?
When I turned 34 this past June, I started writing a book about Lizzy’s life, which has, in the course of writing it, become a book about my life and Cecilia’s life as well. The process of writing this book is deeply therapeutic, almost as though it is another child that must come out of me or kill me in the process. It is forcing me to face up against the darkest and ugliest corners of my life, my journey with my faith, my own weaknesses, and my loss. But I am starting to think that the real reason why writing it matters so much is that I very absolutely need to turn the subjectivity of my love for Lizzy into an objective reality.
“But, Caroline,” you may say with quiet patience, “such a thing is impossible.” And perhaps you are right. I suspect, however, that there is more to it than either you or I can fathom, and that the only way through to that “more” is to finish and publish this book.
Can love and pain ever truly be objective realities since, in order to experience them, they must be encountered through a subjective lens? Honestly, I don’t know. The only thing that I’m sure of is that for people to experience how much Lizzy mattered, I must simulate subjectivity through storytelling. I must bring her to life through my words, let her breath emanate from the page, and let the light of her smile shine through the ink.
My greatest failing has always been my pride, and I have struggled for my entire life with the subjectivity of other people’s pain. For a long time, I arrogantly considered myself to be an endlessly patient listener, a profoundly compassionate ear–nearly an empath in my ability to enter into someone’s suffering with them and thereby help them to overcome it. But a strange sort of transformation has taken place in me since Lizzy’s death, and I find I no longer seem to have the same ability to enter into other people’s pain, which begs the question as to whether or not I ever had it to begin with.
It is far too easy for me these days to be dismissive of the pain, suffering, and frustrations of others. Perhaps this is because I am so constantly occupied with the work involved in managing my own pain, or perhaps it is because I have spent hours since Lizzy’s death reading accounts of the worst atrocities perpetuated by humankind expressly in order to keep my own pain in perspective. Regardless, the result seems to be a concrete lack of empathy in myself while witnessing the pain of others.
I think it began in that month after Lizzy died and before Cecilia was born. At first, any time anyone cried, everyone else cried at the same time. As time passed, however, different people began to break down at different times and their breakdowns no longer resulted in a comprehensive flooding of the premises. I could watch my father and my sisters cry about Lizzy, and, instead of crying with them, I began to feel a quiet grounding in their pain as proof of how much Lizzy mattered.
The word passion originally meant suffering, making the word compassion to mean a suffering with. In that month, I think I reached a place in my grief where I lived the reality of that suffering with so much constancy that I was able to somehow find rest in another’s suffering without allowing my own to consume it. Now, I realize this sounds like a strange thing to say: to use the word “rest” in reference to suffering. Perhaps a better word is presence. I found I could be fully present with another in his or her suffering about Lizzy without allowing my own suffering to drown us both. And, yes, I would argue that the act of being present in the experience of someone else’s grief over Lizzy gave me both grounding, and, in another sense, rest.
What I struggle with now is the suffering of others that has nothing to do with Lizzy. I can watch, hear, and feel the suffering of another without experiencing it myself or letting my own grief touch it. I can be present with the person in his or her suffering, make space for their suffering inside of myself, and still not be consumed by it. I do not know if this is because of the grounding I described above; perhaps, in some way, experiencing other’s grief over Lizzy gave me an island or a raft with which to navigate the oceanic swells of my own grief. Or perhaps my ability to feel pain for something less than the death of a child has simply vanished.
Am I just selfish? Or a robot? Or covered by so much scar tissue that I can no longer feel sensation?
Why can some women have orgasmic births and others leave the hospital scarred and traumatized? They have tried to study the phenomenon of pain and the subjectivity of experience continues to sabotage their carefully designed studies. Brain science has proven that human beings are born only with the reptilian brain intact, controlling survival instincts, and that the mammalian or emotional brain takes nearly all of the first five years of life to develop. The implications of this are far-reaching, especially considering our culture’s tendency to require adult behavior from young children. The frontal lobe, or the human brain that is capable of complex reasoning and critical thinking, develops very slowly throughout childhood and adolescence and even into early adulthood. These days, neurologists are telling us that the act of parenting is literally the act of creating the proper environment for certain neurological pathways to form.
Part of parenting, they tell us, is a sitting with, a being present for, a suffering-with your child when his or her panic/grief trigger has overhauled his or her limbic system and the child has lost control. You may be able to reason that the loss of a favorite toy is not a life-threatening situation. Your child, however, has not yet formed this neurological pathway. It is your job to sit with, listen to, and be present with your child in his or her pain while that pathway forms. You cannot force it to form, nor can you be frustrated with the child for how long it takes to form. Rather, you must create an optimal environment for it to form. In those moments, it’s not actually about you or what you were in the middle of doing or how much time it’s taking. It’s about your child’s grief and your child’s pain, which is profoundly real and devastating to him or her, no matter how little you can empathize with it.
I suspect my current problem with empathy lies in this impatience. I can see or feel another’s pain and think, “You don’t understand pain until you’ve lost a child,” but thinking or feeling this does not make the other’s pain less real, the other less present, or myself less necessary to the other. I think that if I can agree that Cecilia’s rage and frustration when she falls down while trying to walk is deeply real to her, then I must logically agree that an adult’s pain over a lost opportunity, a broken relationship, or a physical illness is, by extension, deeply real to him or her.
Maybe this is a trap to which we, as the parents of dead children, can too easily fall prey. Maybe there is a shiftless and sneaking kind of arrogance to our grief, as though it is deeper, darker, and matters more than anyone else’s. Maybe the pain of another is just as real and just as terrible as my pain, even if that person hasn’t lost a child. Maybe all that is required of me is to be present and to suffer with that individual while he or she struggles to form those pathways. Maybe suffering-with is the real activity of love. And maybe I should pray to be more like St. Bernadette, who suffered without complaining and died knowing that the great mystery of healing, though it came through her, was not meant for her.
