27 April, 2014

Pain | VQR Online

Pain | VQR Online: That evening, my father pulled to the side of County Road B, halfway between work and home. He stopped the car on the gravel shoulder, parked neatly, turned off the engine. The Wisconsin winter stretched out on both sides of him, the gray dark, the endless, flat fields stubbled with chewed-up stalks of corn. He sat sweating and hurting, staring up at the red button. All these years later, I’m still struggling to understand why he didn’t just reach up, press it, and speak that single word: “Help.”

He taught me that the worst, the weakest, the most shameful thing you could do was indulge your pain—​swallow it down, don’t say a word. You didn’t talk about it; you certainly didn’t write about it. His methods killed him, but he did with his pain only what he’d been taught to do, all he knew how to do.

Now the question remains: What will I do with mine?