Before leaving for the residency that will allow me to devote several weeks to writing about pain, I leave a note on my son’s pillow, shamelessly aiming for some expression of love that will tickle his seven-year-old sensibility but still hold true as an articulation of my devotion (in the meantime? for all time should my plane go down?). I love you × 1,000,000. I love you all the time. I love you to infinity. I love you deeper than the Mariana Trench. I love all of you. Every word is true, of course. How, then, to reconcile the feeling that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have had a child?
What I mean is, the pain of labor does usher in a longer-lasting and novel pain condition, that of loving someone more and differently than ever before and having brought that person into the mortal world—not just a world in which we experience pain and death, but a world that is, by our own most vital measures, dying. Every fear is recast: now the nightmare scenario isn’t falling unconscious to the floor, not to be found, but falling unconscious to the floor, immediately to be found by your helpless beloved; isn’t to suffer the nighttime assault or the cataclysmic storm or the devastating drought, but to suffer your child suffering—or witnessing you suffer—it.
This isn’t anything new, but we live in a world with radically new and catastrophic predictions turned calculations quickly turning foregone conclusions, and having a child extends and condenses the math—your math. But a mother’s love and fear in the face of ordinary mortality and looming climate catastrophe is not the kind of pain I mean to address here. Here, I have to remind myself, I mean to focus specifically on the physical kind, a subset even of that. (Each bird is one bird worrying one weak-shelled clutch of eggs or searching for the answer of a morsel or a mate.)
Strategic denial, cool compartmentalization, comparative abyss: I know the facts but can’t stick my nose in them and expect to easily pull it back out. Every new work-up, every new full-history intake, every new megastudy or super-storm—rehearsing the years, aggregating the data—sends me circling down, so, increasingly, I avoid them.
The thing is, hope doesn’t run the numbers on what falls within reach versus what remains beyond our grasp, so each time we start, we start at zero, and this is the rub. Over and over we may hope, but in doing so, sometimes we rub raw. For years, my biggest fear was that I would somehow unwittingly turn away from the one thing that would finally help me. So I kept on with my quest, kept troubling each decision with this fear not only of missing out but of somehow foolishly being the one to make myself miss out on my one chance at a cure. After too many hours, medicines, modalities, and dollars to tally, I still harbor this fear, but a new one has taken up residence beside it—not a fear, exactly, a feeling: maybe to keep hoping, to keep questing, is its own kind of pain; maybe I need to stop.