Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Page B

a very small woman, lifts the blunt end of a pick axe over her head and slams it down on a metal pipe she is driving into the frozen ground. Any portrait of my mother should include a blue-black fingernail.
     
       
    “I breathe, I have a heartbeat, I have pain…” I repeat to myself as I lie in bed at night. I am striving to adopt the pain as a vital sensation. My mother, I know, has already mastered this exercise.
     
       
    Her existence, like my father’s, pains me. This is the upper fixed point of love.
     
       
    Once, for a study of chronic pain, I was asked to rate not just my pain but also my suffering. I rated my pain as a three. Having been sleepless for nearly a week, I rated my suffering as a seven.
     
       
    “Pain is the hurt, either physical or emotional, that we experience,” writes the Reverend James Chase. “Suffering is the story we tell ourselves of our pain.”
     
       
    Yes, suffering is the story we tell ourselves.
     
       
    “At the moment we are devoid of any standard criteria as to what constitutes suffering,” Reverend Chase writes in his paper on genetic therapy, which is more a meditation on suffering. “Since we do not have agreed-upon criteria, it would be negligent to make decisions for others regarding suffering. We might be able to answer this for ourselves, but not for others….
     
       
    “If we come to the point where we have no place for suffering, to what lengths will we go to eradicate it? Will we go so far as to inflict suffering to end it?”
     
       
    Christianity is not mine. I do not know it and I cannot claim it. But I’ve seen the sacred heart ringed with thorns, the gaping wound in Christ’s side, the weeping virgin, the blood, the nails, the cross to bear…. Pain is holy, I understand. Suffering is divine.
     
       
    In my worst pain, I can remember thinking, “This is not beautiful.” I can remember being disgusted by the very idea.
     
       
    But in my worst pain, I also found myself secretly cherishing the phrase, “This too shall pass.” The longer the pain lasted, the more beautiful and impossible and absolutely holy this phrase became.
    The Worst Pain Imaginable
     
    Through a failure of my imagination, or of myself, I have discovered that the pain I am in is always the worst pain imaginable.
     
       
    But I would like to believe that there is an upper limit to pain. That there is a maximum intensity nerves can register.
     
       
    There is no tenth circle in Dante’s Hell.
     
       
    The digit ten depends on the digit zero, in our current number system. In 1994 Robert Forslund developed an Alternative Number System. “This system,” he wrote with triumph, “eliminates the need for the digit zero, and hence all digits behave the same.”
     
       
    In the Alternate Number System, the tenth digit is represented by the character A. Counting begins at one: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, 11, 12…18, 19, 1A, 21, 22…28, 29, 2A…98, 99, 9A, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, AA, 111, 112…
     
       
    “One of the functions of the pain scale,” my father explains, “is to protect doctors — to spare them some emotional pain. Hearing someone describe their pain as a ten is much easier than hearing them describe it as a hot poker driven through their eyeball into their brain.”
     
       
    A better scale, my father thinks, might rate what patients would be willing to do to relieve their pain. “Would you,” he suggests, “visit five specialists and take three prescription narcotics?” I laugh because I have done just that. “Would you,” I offer, “give up a limb?” I would not. “Would you surrender your sense of sight for the next ten years?” my father asks. I would not. “Would you accept a shorter life span?” I might. We are laughing, having fun with this game. But later, reading statements collected by the American Pain Foundation, I am alarmed by the number of references to