His Father's Pain

His Father's Pain

All his life Peter had carried the pain about with him. Sometimes intense. sometimes no more than a dull ache. Sometimes for months at a time he was hardly aware of it, but it was always there. He knew that. It had a precise location, always the same, a spot below the ribs, an inch inside, four fingers from the point where his lower ribs met. He could put his fingers in there, feel it.

All his life be had been aware of it. He had taken the pain to doctors. They had poked and probed at various intervals. Once they had diagnosed ulcers. They had prescribed milky medications, which had relieved it only for the moment. Then it came back. Sometimes it was so intense he feared it could be cancer, a burning growth expanding inside him. Sometimes he was afraid of dying. It was like a death inside him, so intense, so obdurate. And sometimes the pain would lie low, more of a shadow than a pain, a dis-ease lurking quietly in the rib cage.

The pain was with him thirty years, the length of his adult life. Until he found its healer. At first he did not know this would be the healer of the pain. For many weeks, they talked. They talked about the fears, the insecurities, the longings, and the needs. They talked about the rage he had carried with him all his life. They talked about his weakness and his strength. Some of these things he knew, some he didn't.

Some of these things they enacted. Always there was the empty chair, his partner, his antagonist. Whoever came to mind was invited there, to sit in it: his wife, his father, his anger, his fear. Whoever came to mind, whoever was necessary to the occasion, whoever needed to be addressed, whoever needed to bc heard from - there was always someone. They came unbidden from wherever it was they lived, from dark, hidden parts of him, from unexamined corners of his body: the awkward tilt of the head, the crick in the back, the back, the avoided gaze. There was always someone.

It was weeks, months even, before the healer touched him. When the trust was there. Once the defenses had begun to fall. When the body was ready with its invitation. The first time, the healer went only where he was invited, his fingers probing the depth to which the pain was tolerable.