When Pain Stacks Two Deep

I learned in Taco Bell my mom was going to die. For once, she and Dad chose words that were not coated in hope and partial truths. A fast food dining room was a fitting setting, both the plastic, fast-food booth and the news unforgiving. The melanoma skin cancer that had existed as a barreling train on the tracks of Mom’s life for five years, always behind her but never upfront about how far back nor how fast it was gaining, was going to get her: she had less than two years remaining.

I learned that my son was going to die on the night he died, but my husband and I got the first news of his congenital heart condition while I was on my back, watching the ultra sound technician squint and stumble over her buttons in an effort to get a closer look at Baby B’s disfigured beating heart.

These two bits of grave information landed on me very close together.

Too close.

I did not know how to lose my mom. I did not know how to house twins, one with a broken heart that would need multiple surgeries to fix once he came out, one whose body would eventually grow too weak to keep up the fight. I did not know how to say goodbye to a cherished life a generation above me at the same time I was bringing one so precarious into the world a generation below me.

What I did know was that I could not handle these deeply emotional journeys – my mother dying and my son sick– concurrently. When pain hits two deep, I learned that there is only so much space for it.

Is your pain two deep? Three, four deep?

May I nudge you: house one pain at a time. Let each one do what it wants with you, fully taking you over – but only one at a time. Let one pain fill you like a water feature with a ceaseless stream cascading into a bucket. Let it fill you until you yield with the weight and gush out – in your bed, in the shower, over your journal pages. Then, back upright, let it fill you once more.

Listen for the other pain, meanwhile, for when it is louder or stronger or more white water. Then, consciously break from housing your first pain and commit fully to the second. First Pain will not feel cheated or slighted; it will be there for when your bucket is available for it again.

I would take breaks from the knowledge that I had a very high risk pregnancy and a very sick child on the way. I would cry then only as a daughter losing her mom… like that was the only thing in the world to weep over. My tears were not split. One bucket.

Then, I’d return to the pain of my son’s broken body, the medical trouble he faced, we faced. More tears. One bucket.

Sometimes the change-over would happen after days, weeks. Sometimes a handful of times in the same hour. But always I forced my pain, two deep, to take turns.

Like a toddler wanting your attention, give one pain at a time all of it.