Living With Someone Else's Pain

How do we cope with the day in day out of living with someone else's chronic, acute pain?

When you wear too tight clothing, it rubs somewhere. You chafe or blister or walk funny. You take it off and feel better. You lose weight and feel better. There's a solution one way or the other.

But you can't take off some pain, and you almost surely can't take off someone else's. If you don't care for the person or don't have regular, close contact with her, perhaps you can avoid her. With a loved one, an immediate family member, that is not a likely solution.

The family is a unit. It functions as a symbiotic life form all its own, and pain or another crisis rips the covers off that reality, sunning it in the heat of reality. When one family member hurts, all hurt. Maybe we each feel the rub in a different place and in a different way and to a different degree. But we each must find a way to cope with the pain that upholds the others individually and the family as a whole. We each reach for the handhold that will build our corporate strength so that we cope together in unity, because to withdraw, to opt out, is to weaken all and self, to collapse under the weight of a would-be usurper.

So when one person lies awake in pain or has to be accommodated in daily activity to alleviate pain and reaches out to the others for help or lashes out in exhaustion, frustration, and agony, the family unit changes, adapts to cope. How?

Words like knocked arrows poise to fly on death's wings through a heart
or like living water pour comfort into the soul

Each moment our lips and tongues tense to ship words into the world we have a choice.

There is an old saying: least said soonest mended.

So spare, careful, caring words can bond a family in pain. What more?

I ponder elements that build in crisis and will post as they coalesce into coherent thought.