The counting of days, the accounting of hours, is necessarily a mortal finitude. Looking back may have its hazards, but peering into the future does, too. This is the treacherous dovetail: denial may be how I’ve managed migraine, but migraine is what undoes my denial. In those dimly lit treatment rooms and outside of them, I learned there’s no good time to be stricken and no preparation for being struck. Vulnerability jars into every cell, into every sense of past and future self: I know my weakness, I taste regularly the salt of overwhelming pain on my tongue, and through the present of this pain—the, my—I slide into the possibility of others—your, his, our.
Prediction, prognosis, prophecy: the forward projection may be something we lean toward, even yearn for, but fortune-telling flirtations aside, concrete prognostications are something we tend to avoid, even in the protected realms of our imaginations. In other words, distressing as it may be to crunch the numbers of stricken hours past, it’s something else entirely to calculate those to come.
“We’ve been coming here for forty years,” says my mother, inhaling deeply of salt and scrub pine, ocean to the left, lighthouse to the right. We’re standing on a small promontory, fenced in and adorned with a plaque explaining how fifteen years earlier they moved the lighthouse fifty yards back from the eroding dune’s edge. How long before they’ll need to move it again?
Since the dawn of his relational consciousness, I’ve worried toward the moment when the development of my son’s analytic mind would require an introduction to certain facts (tragic knowing): about me, about the world into which he’d been ushered. “The good thing is that even though they cause me a lot of pain, the headaches don’t actually hurt me,” I find myself saying periodically, aware that I’m making little sense. “I mean, they don’t harm me,” I attempt to clarify. “They won’t kill me; they’ll never be what makes me die.”
“Pain is always different to the sufferer,” writes Alphonse Daudet in In the Land of Pain, his unfinished autobiographical novel, “but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me.”
“I have a headache,” he says when it’s time to do his homework. “Water, get me water,” he moans, flinging himself across the bed, “and migraine meds!” Then he pops up, smiling. “Mama, what I think of migraine is like a flock of migrating birds coming and hitting your head—not on the outside, but on the inside of your mind.”