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3. Pain-Bearing
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83 chapter 3 Pain-Bearing The Suffering Space Sext Sitting next to a bride, a bride and wife for twenty five years, half a union of two people. All her life’s hopes, fears, dreams, her security to have and to hold has come to this: a chair on a pier in a white curtained booth a blue rug, a table, a computer, the face of a lawyer concerned, patient, waiting— Her trembling hand as she picks up a pen fumbles with it, puts it back down— Oh my darling, my darling, O God, he’s gone, isn’t he— He’s really gone. Oh my darling. My sweet, sweet love. Her breath on my throat. Her tears on my cheek. And we’re quiet in a moment of hush. Then she gathers herself to sign the affidavit and, as a blow to her body, admit for ever that her husband is dead.1 Pain-bearing is painful. Yet it is part and parcel of the context of pastoral care. Most of the chaplains found the empathic connections with the suffering of others deeply touching and at times incredibly sad, sometimes not only a “body blow” to the other but to themselves. But, as one chaplain said when asked whether he experienced sadness or a sense of his own suffering, “I wasn’t aware other than the horror of the situation and that aspect of it and what people were going through; it didn’t touch me individually, I didn’t lose a family member, I didn’t know anyone who had been lost.” Trauma and Transformation at Ground Zero 84 In such a pastoral reflection, why would we use the word pain? As a pastoral psychotherapist I would generally not use the word pain, to discourage somatization —a feeling with your body instead of your emotions—or to encourage people not to distance themselves by generalizing but to be specific about what it was that was “painful,” to get closer to the sadness, the anger, the fear. Here, paradoxically, for the same reasons I choose to use the word pain—because it is all-encompassing but does not prescribe. It acknowledges that at times we do hold things in our body that we do not have the time, space, or resources to hold in our minds, and it declinicalizes and humanizes what we will explore under the terms trauma and stress. It locates pain in the space of affect and of meaning in the subjective experience of the human person. One can see all that is spoken of under these terms simply in the natural language of some of the chaplains. As we will explore, finding the language is a part of the task of coming to terms with the reality of suffering that we face as humans, as this chaplain graphically described: Probably the people who helped us the most at the very beginning of being in the Pit were the volunteers who had been chaplains at Oklahoma City who came here. And we were kind of overwhelmed, like “My God, what do you do?” They were the ones who told us, “Find your center. Do one thing at a time. Figure out where you’re going to go next. Take one step at a time. Don’t look at the whole thing because you’ll get crazy.” They had the experience of working through that and so that kind of was the process. If something was really sticking, if something was really awful . . . I mean, the painful thing was when they recovered enough of human remains that you could actually see the face. And some of the faces were in awful grimaces, really the horror of death, the horror of knowing they were dying in that moment. Or maybe they had more than a few minutes of being buried alive in that rubble before they died. It was like everything you ever saw in horror movies or horror comics and that would stick in the gut in the heart. And so we could sit down with somebody, [like this] wonderful woman, [name], and she had the most irreverent attitude to everything. But you could sit and talk to her and she would sit and listen and wait until she knew that each of us was beyond the hurt point because we had now got it out. Because it was almost literally like reaching in and grabbing a hold of this shaft of pain and pulling it out...