Monday
We ask for your prayers as my 95-year-old mother fell and fractured her pelvis on Friday. While I think we’ll get her back next week—no surgery is required—she’s currently in a local hospital. This pain poem helps me sympathize with her condition and also prompts me to bless the existence of morphine.
A Poem about Pain
By David BudbillI can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing
from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you’re in
is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything
but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other lifedon’t matter.
I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and
how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,
their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.