Sweet Misery

It’s possible to transcend pain 

I’m in a glum mood today. I’m sitting in my dining room, overlooking the nearby lake. Normally that would be cause for a contented smile and an upbeat mood. But today it’s rainy and overcast, we’re housebound because of the Covid epidemic, my bad hip is acting up, and to cap it all off, the radio is playing Hoyt Axton’s “Sweet Misery.”

Sweet misery
She loves her company
She's in a crowd when she is all alone
She doesn't care
Follow you everywhere
She is most happy when she makes you moan

So I’m gloomy, and my mind has wandered back to a time of misery and pain for me.

In 1988, four days after my forty-eighth birthday, I had a heart attack, actually a series of five of them in the space of four days. I was in the VA hospital in San Francisco, in the recovery room with three other veterans of the Viet Nam War, all of us victims of the long-term effects of Agent Orange. I had had heart surgery—they went up through my diaphragm, rather than crack my chest, so they could implant some electronic gear in and around my heart. It was pain and misery with every breath, and a sneeze was a knife in my gut. Worst pain of my life until I dislocated my hip thirty-two years later.

Yes, I felt sorry for myself. Yes, I cried. Yes, I was miserable. But, as you’ll see, that’s not the point.

In the bed next to mine in a four-man hospital room was Ronnie. Nice guy. I liked him instantly. Ronnie got the worst that Agent Orange could do to you. He had lost his left leg a couple of years earlier due to circulatory issues brought on by diabetes, and he had heart problems worse than mine. He was at the VA this time to lose the other leg, below the knee. We came out of our respective procedures about the same time, and were both gradually overwhelmed by pain as the anesthetics wore off. 

That night, long past midnight, in the darkest part of dark, a small sound brought me half awake. It was Ronnie, sitting upright (as upright as he could manage), hugging the remainder of his leg tightly against his body, rocking back and forth. He was trying not to whimper. Quiet suffering. Rocking. On and on, into the night…

The next morning, early, before breakfast, Ronnie apologized to us. He hoped he hadn’t disturbed our sleep.

You need a word that’s worse than agony to describe Ronnie’s pain, yet his first thought in the morning was about the rest of us. Somewhere in his mountain of suffering, he had the humanity to think about us, be concerned for us, and hope he hadn’t made it worse for us, if even a little bit.

How do you relate to pain? You know it’s a choice, don’t you? You can’t ignore it…that’s not the choice. The choice is that you can give in to it and be miserable, or you can see it for what it is, coexist with it, and not lose yourself to it.

It’s a hard choice because intense pain overwhelms you. It expands your awareness to the size of the universe, and fills everything with hurt. 

It’s a hard choice because pain is personal. Pain wants to make it “all about me” with no allowance for anything or anyone other than your own suffering. 

But it’s possible, even in misery, to expand your spirit beyond yourself. Even when it hurts so bad you have to scream, you can be touched by grace. 

So, that’s where I’m headed with all this recollection of pain and misery. Grace. The possibility of grace was taught to me by the suffering of a nice guy named Ronnie. 

Grace doesn’t eliminate suffering, or even reduce it, but it allows us to hold on to our humanity when pain tries to reduce us to small whimpering animals. Ultimately, grace is what gets us to the other side of the pain, spirit intact, ready to heal in body, mind, and soul.

I’ll never know for sure, but I think grace, not suffering, is what Hoyt Axton had in mind when he wrote Sweet Misery.