Pain

He was incarcerated for 30 years.

He is one of the kindest, sweetest, most gentle men I have ever met.

He is deep. He is insightful. I absolutely adore him.

When I leave my room after a Zoom class and my eyes are teary, my kids know he must have said something profound. They know about him. I can’t imagine what he was like thirty years ago or what he could have possibly done that got him incarcerated for that amount of time.

His English isn’t great, even now. I don’t know any details or what got him in trouble. I am sure there must have been many things that led up to whatever happened to him then.

What I do know is what is now. Now, is what matters.

He was released from incarceration. He is my student.

He is incredibly important to me. He currently lives with his two sisters.

In class he constantly shares the complication of the relationship with the three of them. The whole family living together consists of his two sisters, their husbands, their children and him.

His stories make me laugh, hard. As someone who has two sisters herself, I find his predicament funny. He desperately does not want to take sides and gets in trouble when he tries to be the peacemaker between his two sisters.

He is damned when he does anything, and damned if he doesn’t do anything.

Thirty years he was away. Thirty years of relationships with his sisters lost.

He tells the class how hard it is for him to see one of his sisters suffer. She is having issues with her husband. He tells us, “I want to take away all of my sister’s pain. I see how hard it is for her.”

I say softly, “What if it’s not your job to take away her pain but to just sit with her in the pain.” He tears up. “Wow, that is deep,” he says.

“I spent so much time away. I had a lot of pain. I decided when I get out I will not have pain and I will take my family’s pain away. I caused them so much pain.” He adds. “I had a lot of time to think about all this, Ms., a lot of time.”

I take a breath, thinking about what to say, not sure I have anything to say.

He continues, “When you have lost so much and had too much pain, everything is good, the flowers, the sun, food, my family. The good is taking away all pain.”

I see people nodding.

“My sister has so much good, but she lets her husband make it all bad. This is sad.”

I smile. “I have a feeling it is so much more complicated than that,” I say.

I picture these siblings together trying to make up for lost time, pretending to know each other even though the last time they were together they were young teens and now they are in mid-life. I think of my own siblings. There are four of us. I am the youngest. I feel incredibly lucky to have these three older humans there for me.

I tell him. “You know, recently something really shitty happened to me. I called my brother and I sobbed and sobbed on the phone, snot coming out of my nose sobbing.” They all laughed.

“You know what he did? Nothing! He listened and said, ‘I’m sorry Nomsie. I really am.’ He told me what he thought about the situation, gave me some advice, and then we hung up. To be honest,” I said, “I am not really sure what he said, but he just let me cry and be where I needed to be. He actually told me that I need to be sad about this, really sad.”

“What?” my student said. “He told you to be sad? He is a little loco (crazy).”

“No, he is actually really smart. If your sister is in danger, make sure she is safe, but if she is sad, it’s okay. Let her be what she needs to be.”

“AHH, this is too hard,” he says.

A different student chimed in, “Man, when you are locked up, you have the pain of being away. When you get out, there is the pain of being here and…”

Someone cut him off. “The pain inside is the pain of missing life. The pain on the outs, it’s the pain of living life. Those are different. Man, live your life with the pain and love it ‘cause you know the other pain is the shit, and you got nothing you can do about it.”

I sit with that advice in my head after my class thinking about living life with pain, loving pain, not being able to comprehend being locked up for decades and the pain of that. I don’t think I will ever be able to understand being locked up even though I have been hearing the stories about it for almost a decade.

“Ms.,” he told me in the next class, “I have been thinking about pain, and I think there really is the pain inside when you are locked up, and the pain outside when you get out. The pain that is horrible pain, and the pain you can live with. And then, like you said, the pain we need to sit with. The pain is different. The death pain is a level that is up here. (He raises his hand outside of the Zoom screen.) and there is pain here. (He puts his hand on his heart.) and then there is the pain of seeing someone you love in pain. I am trying to separate the pain and know the difference.”

Then one wise student answered and summed it up for us all.

“Stop trying so hard. You are out. You are here. That is what matters. There is some pain you can’t do anything about. Some pain is like a mother fucker and doesn’t leave you. That pain becomes like an extra leg. You learn to walk like a weird dog and that turns into your walk. Then there is other people’s pain. You gotta be careful not to let that be heavy on your heart. Dude, you got freedom. That is joy. Joy is a painkiller, so focus on the joy.”

And I say no more.