For anyone who has ever read The Fault In Our Stars, they know for a book that is about two kids facing terminal cancer, it has some lessons on life.
One of the quotes I have seen thrown around in Nerdfighteria is the quote “That’s a thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” It’s a quote that has been really making me think these last couple of days.
Does pain really have to be felt? I mean, I know physical pain demands to be felt but what about spiritual pain. Does that have to be felt?
As I write this blog, I am sitting here in great physical pain thanks to our frenemy, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. It’s been a weird nerve disorder I have suffered from for about three years now and today it kicked my butt.
I also have some emotional and spiritual pain as I am dealing with preparing myself for yet another family funeral that is looming. And because of things with my family, that one is tougher to deal with.
The pain in sharp and horrible and it reminds me of another moment from that great work by John Green when we are faced with the death of Augustus Waters. In the part where Augustus dies, Hazel talks about how when she’s been in the hospital, the nurses always ask her about her pain. The use a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain ever.
In the illustration that Hazel uses, she says about one ER visit were the nurse asked and she held up nine fingers. Later on, the nurse tells Hazel that she must be brave because she called a pain that was a ten a nine.
Not so because in that whole monologue, Hazel ends it with this: But that wasn’t the truth. I didn’t call it a nine because I was brave. The reason I called it a nine was because I was saving my ten. And this was it… This was the great and terrible ten.
For me, this is my great and terrible ten. I am heartbroken because I allowed fear to deny me the chance to see a dying relative one last time and this time it is a relative who I cared about.
The fear for me was because of my extended family and how not all of them are welcoming to me. The relative isn’t in a place to say, “We need to not have the drama” so it’s pretty much a painful moment. And even if this relative was, I would still have that awkward issue of dealing with a family that has given me so much pain.
I know this firsthand because it happened before with me and this family. I had an uncle who was dying and he asked people to visit with him in his final hours. He was in a place where he was aware enough that he was dying and he didn’t want the discord of the family dynamic to be an issue.
There was still that awkward nature though. As I sat there with family that I liked and a lot that I tolerated and/or didn’t speak to for a couple of years, I cried inside. I remember thinking to myself in the days after his passing, if I had to endure that again, it would be the end of me.
And here it is two years later and I felt that enough to where I had the way to see this relative one final time and I didn’t do it because this time, it would just be me with those awkward feelings.
I have been traumatized by the whole death and dying process thanks to my family. I also have been traumatized by the whole process of dealing with a major health issue thanks to my family. I had one aunt who was having strokes and my dad and I were constant visitors until one day we stopped. I didn’t know what was going on but I found out that the aunt was in the hospital and what room she was in. No one told me that she was in a medical coma and then later, no one told me she was out of it, taken to rehabilitation which the facility did not do too much for her and taken back to the hospital for a health issue. I tried to contact my one cousin and she never bothered to return my calls and texts so I didn’t know they put her in a hospice and by the time I found out, it was too late because there was no way I could make it to that hospice to see her one last time.
I never got the chance to say good-bye and my final memory of her is being hooked to machines so about a year later when my mom ended up in ICU after a thyroid surgery as a precaution when her oxygen level dropped in post-op, I had a panic attack despite the fact that she was awake and not hooked to machines. And then about a year after that when my mom was in what my local hospital calls the CTU (it’s an ICU for people who had heart surgery), I was afraid to go anywhere near her because of all the tubes and wires even though I knew she would be okay. It took a nurse to give me the courage to do this and truth is while I have seen this stuff a lot as a hospital volunteer, I don’t think I will ever be okay with this and it is all because of my family.
And now I face another issue with this and this time, it’s because my family intimidates me to where I didn’t even bother going to see this relative one last time. I know this one will destroy me immensely and I may end up being in a state of a very deep and dark depression. I also know that no one will know because I will be expected to put on a “brave face.” I will be like Hazel who gave a pain that was a ten a nine on that scale when in reality, I am slowly breaking inside.
But this will be my terrible ten.
Yes, we can either dull the pain or ignore it but a time will come when we have to deal with the pain and do something. Maybe in the end, we should all be like the way Hazel was at the end of The Fault In Our Stars and realized that Augustus demanded that Van Houten see her at the funeral and give her the eulogy that he was working with Augustus on that was for Hazel. In that scene, Hazel read the words, looked up at the stars and simply said, “Okay.”
May we all have pain that doesn’t demand to be felt.
DFTBA