What Pain Teaches Us

Learning from an unwanted teacher and uninvited guests into our lives

None of us are immune from pain. If we live long enough, each of us are stung by the stinger of a bee called ‘pain,’ that ruins us for a time. Be it physical, emotional, mental or relational—all kinds of pain appear on the “buffeteria” of life—there’s plenty of pain to go around and the pain seems to come in different colors, shapes and spiciness. But, here’s the deal with pain, we don’t get to choose the kind of pain that undoes us. Pain is universal; unaffiliated with a political party and not tied to one nationality, race or gender.

Pain happens. And it is ours to learn to deal with it—however it comes; whenever it happens and for as long as the pain lasts.

Gwen, my wife has had a total reverse shoulder replacement surgery this week. It’s day 3 post-surgery and now we are in the pain management phase, as if pain is a sterile, benign force. I’m not new to pain. I had my own back surgery and prostate surgery three years ago. It was awful and it is somehow, even more awful to be a witness to someone you love be in pain. She is doing well and the Doctor is pleased with his work. Now, it’s her work and my work, as the caregiver that stirs up my poetic heart.

Pain is not just physical. Many of us are in degrees of emotional pain—discomfort and turmoil that leaves us disoriented from the life we just had a few weeks ago. Pain upends our lives; resorts us like dirty clothes in the washing machine and leaves us wadded up and our souls wrinkled.

During Gwen’s surgery, I sat in the waiting room of our hospital and I became focused on a very large TV screen, a display of “Patient Status” while they were being prepped; while they were in the OR or while they moved to recovery. That turned on my poetic heart and I wrote a poem about what I was seeing and feeling.

Here’s that poem below and then on the 3rd day, “Post-OP”, I just now came up to my glass tree house while she is comfortable and wrote a new poem on “pain.” Perhaps, these two poems might offer some words to express something you’ve experienced or someone you love has felt.

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