The Memory of Pain

Awhile back, I had a toothache.

I don’t mean a sort of ache-in-the-gums, vague, “oh, I’d better brush more regularly” toothache. I am talking about a full-blown nuclear meltdown in my teeth. Throughout my life I have been blessed with pretty strong teeth but now the evil forces of dental decay had their vengeance. It caught me entirely by surprise and totally unequipped to deal with the sudden implacable demands made upon me by my screaming nervous system. For more than a week, the rest of my life receded to the periphery of my cognition and I became absorbed with finding any relief whatsoever. I learned, too late and to my regret, that in matters of dental hygiene, the wages of laziness is agony.

But my agony, per se, is not what I want to write about. During this ordeal I suffered through every shade and flavor of physical pain I can imagine. At times the toothache was a dull pressure in my jaw. Other times, without warning, a spike of pain would impale me, a localized burst of misery shrinking my world down to one malfunctioning molar. There were even occasions when my ears hurt, a smooth sine wave of suffering slowly sidling from the socket of my tooth along my jaw, into my inner ear, and back. Sometimes I suffered stoically; sometimes, lights went off behind my eyes and I jumped into motion unable to bear sitting still with my pain.

There were respites. A steady stream of cold water provided fleeting but effective relief. Zinc tablets helped, apparently by poisoning the nerve or some other awful thing. A fourfold dosage of Motrin came to my rescue on multiple occasions. In the end, exhaustion itself served as a palliative. Through it all, the toothache remained – sometimes chained off in a dark corner of my mind, like a long-forgotten nightmare, but omnipresent and always trying to claw its way back into the light. I was aware of it, every texture and hue of misery, and it was aware of me. I might achieve a standoff but I knew we would keep wrestling.

That’s when I became conscious of something which I suppose I’d known but which I’d never really comprehended: The human mind cannot remember pain. We can remember the fact of pain but we (or at least I) don’t re-experience the actual sensation. This is quite different from other memories. At this moment I can cast my mind back to a concert and relive Marc Cohn leading an audience in a Gospel rendition of “Walking in Memphis”. I can feel the sunlight on my face and I can feel the excitement as I walked onto the field at Stanford Stadium to receive my degree. I can still taste the cake from the wedding of my best and oldest friend. But for the life of me I cannot recall, cannot reconstruct, cannot relive the pain of this world-shattering toothache, from a bare month ago. Even during the toothache, during those moments I was pain-free, I was conscious only of the fact of my toothache and the likelihood of its return.

I’m not complaining, of course. Pain is not the sort of thing one asks for in life. Once done with, it is happiest consigned to the past. But I still find it curious. I don’t particularly want to relive my car accident from December but I can. There’s a moment where things moved too quickly for me to comprehend, and so I do not remember anything but a blur. But my memories of pain are different. They’re not missing, exactly. It’s more like they’ve been covered by clear plastic, visible but not touchable – the difference, I suppose, between a window and a picture. Although I know that I experienced such moments, they still seem to belong to someone else. Stability and equanimity are gained by severing the connection, but something, too, is lost.

When I was twelve going on thirteen, on one ordinary June day, my father committed suicide. It happened out of the blue – my father was never moody or depressed, at least to the eyes of a twelve-year-old – and it sundered my world. I have the distinct memory of the fact of vertigo, the sudden sensation that the floor had been pulled out from under me. I can remember that I received the news at the screen door near the kitchen in the house that, up until this point, we lived. I remember clearly that I had just opened the first issue of a new magazine devoted to the then-hippest computer, a Commodore 64, and I can even recall a flash of irritation at being called away from my current article over to the kitchen door, where I was told my father was dead.

I can’t remember who told me, though, and I can’t remember what they said. My next memory is of lying sprawled face-down on our old couch, on the other side of the house, keening a wordless cry. And now, more than two and a half decades later, I might recall that moment – and I feel sympathy for that almost-teenage boy – but I cannot bring the feeling back. Without quite intending to, I have lacquered over that bit of my life mosaic. It took four years, and several intense sessions with a counselor, for me to even admit to myself that I had painted it over. I now know I felt these things, but I cannot now feel them again, not even in echoes.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t particularly want to experience pain, but once I have, I don’t want to have wasted the effort.