Until three weeks ago, pain was somebody’s else’s problem. Not the sharp hurts that come and go, or even the sustained misery of illness—that’s been manageable, lucky me. Those came, they went. Always I was returned to what I thought of as “myself.” 

This is different, pain revealed for what pain really is: a relentless stalker. This Thing is crazy for you though you never noticed it before, lurking. It knows all about you. Been watching you for years. Your life now is an alley you traverse solo in the dark, knowing even in a rare blissful moment of release, it just might snap out of the shadows. You’re all it cares about.

I’m talking, as people my age (over seventy) often do, about back pain. Spinal stenosis, lower back, specifically the 4-5 lumbar disc, which threw in the towel—or twisted it—the morning of March 24 for no good reason. No, doctor, I didn’t do anything. I just woke up. And I was in agony. The medical establishment prefers the term “discomfort,” but I insist on “agony.” If I feel I’m not being taken seriously, I ratchet it up to “excruciating agony.” There is nothing modern about this. It is medieval, the rack and the breaking wheel. The only thing new about it is it’s happening to me.

My most intense relationship now is with this Thing. I tend it, I attempt to placate it, like a prisoner catering to her jailer, hoping for small favors. What do you want from me? Cold pack, hot pack, cold pack? I google whether Advil or Tylenol is the preferred pain reliever. I “push fluids.” I try to outwit the Thing with the stretches I’m told to do. I walk—or hobble, a fervent convert to my physical therapist’s first commandment: Keep Moving. I am urged to get an Apple Watch at an outrageous price, and I obey. “Time to stand!” it demands with a little buzz at the wrist just when I have finally succeeded in concentrating on what I’m reading, what I’m writing. “Time to stand!” And I do.

I was also sent to a massive blond building in a wan shopping mall in a distant suburb. No windows, but a great black sans serif logo over the entry: THE PAIN CENTER. I hadn’t thought of pain as its own medical specialty. The Pain Center is not about illness or cures. Those who enter aren’t, apparently, sick. Not exactly. We are in pain. Strange, how wise language is: we are not “in cancer,” not “in heart disease.” But pain—we are in pain. A description rather than a diagnosis. 

Nothing recommended works. Or, more cruelly, something works for an hour, a half hour. Then it’s back, this abusive relationship. But enough trying to describe it. You either know all about it because you’ve been there yourself or you’re bored with this baroque description. I could go on, trust me, for many more pages—how it stabs, then slithers and jags down the leg, numbs the sole of the foot, tingles and seizes and squeezes. Mainly, as a man sitting next to me in the waiting room of the Pain Center said, it’s a pain in the butt. 

The inability to sleep is the worst of it. 

But then yesterday in the dark night of the lumbar 4-5 soul (around 2:30 a.m.), when it was clear that there would be no more sleep as there had not been the night before, or the night before that, I was vouchsafed a vision (as saints once said of their torment). It came with mild declarative certainty: You no longer need to fear death. The pain can’t follow you there.

It’s hard to describe, even to myself, the oddly liberating sensation of this moment. It wasn’t remotely suicidal. The opposite. It was an awareness that pain is not simply “a part of life.” It was—is—life itself. No pain, no gain, as the old Jane Fonda exercise workouts barked out. 

In that dark night, my eyes springing open, what I wanted almost as much as the cessation of pain was the reason for it. Wherefore, why? Well, there is no reason. This is the body busting and breaking down here and there. It will, eventually, collapse altogether. But in that moment of odd reassurance—You don’t need to fear…the pain can’t follow you—I quit fighting what cannot be fought. For a while anyway. The photoflash of that moment has not faded. 

That’s when I joined up. With life, but really, I think, with the human race. Solidarity with my people, the confederation of the condemned. AKA everybody. Could this be the beginning of empathy?

I can’t claim much. But it would be inaccurate to claim nothing at all of that dark-night moment. To my surprise (and some odd pleasure), I’ve begun to notice other people more sharply, how they walk, shagging along, favoring a hip, hunching a shoulder, their intakes of breath, a pause, the array of bodily tolerations of debility. They’re acquiescing to pain, learning the new word—agony. Sucking it up. 

Everyone’s in pain. I see this with the new eyes of my lower back. The message is clear, if unspoken—you’re withering, wasting as surely as the hyacinth in your neighbor’s garden that broke fresh and damp out of the dark soil, the bright blossom with its brief lifespan whose sweet violet scent you once bent so easily to take in.

This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.