I recently heard Horatio Spaford's great song, “It is Well With My Soul”. I was moved, as I have been many times before. How is it that a song, a really old song, hasn't gotten musty and useless over the years? Why do the words of others have the ability to touch our hearts so deeply?
Have you ever wondered how an author seems to be inside your head?
I looked up the story behind the song hoping to find some answers. It turns out Spaford's writing didn’t come out of a vacuum, but out of his own suffering. His experience can teach you how to powerfully connect your own suffering to the larger, human experience.
Photo by Vinoth Chandar
Spaford’s Suffering
The story is compelling. Spaford was a lawyer who lived in Chicago during the late 1800s. After his young son died and he lost a large real estate investment in the Chicago fire of 1871, he decided his family needed a vacation. Due to a business delay he sent his family, wife Anna and their four daughters, ahead of him to England by ship.
On November 22, 1873 the steamship Ville du Havre was struck by an iron sailing vessel and sunk. All four of his daughters died, and only his wife survived. Horatio boarded a ship right away to meet his grieving wife in England. As he passed over the spot where his daughters had lost their lives he wrote the words to “It is Well With My Soul”:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.It is well,
with my soul,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Horatio wrote this song in response to his own pain, but the words went on to comfort generations.
Pain is a common denominator and we all want to know someone understands. What better way to connect with your readers than to tap into the pain of your life, or that of another, and make it useful. When you offer pain up as a gift, it allows others a way to connect. Sharing pain makes it meaningful.
Use Your Pain
There are dangers to this kind of writing. It opens up the most sensitive places of your life and can make you vulnerable to misunderstanding and censure. You need to be aware of the potential consequences of such vulnerability. You also need to be careful not to make your readers responsible for your own emotions and healing. Sharing too much can be, well, too much. You don't want your readers to walk away feeling like the victims of your emotional spew.
However, with the right amount of transparency in your stories will connect your readers to their own places of pain. Your words may even transform their pain into joy.
Have you been moved by someone else’s pain in a song or a piece of literature? What was it that moved you?
Practice
Think about a painful experience in your life and what you learned from it. Then write for fifteen minutes about that experience in a way that connects with your readers and shares meaning. It can be either a fictional or non-fictional piece.
Post your practice in the comments section below, and make sure to comment on a few pieces by other writers as well!
My first book, Welcome Home, is loosely based on the pain of coming out of the closet, losing friends both to estrangement and death, and being alienated from my mother. All of those issues are covered in the book, but it’s main theme is forgiveness. I’ve had lots of responses from people thanking me for helping them see that forgiveness and moving forward are possible.
I had not know the story behind my favorite hymn. Thank you so much for sharing it.
Oh Glenda that sounds like a brave work indeed! I’m sure many people have been touched by your words and heart. Doesn’t Horatio Spaford’s story add such meaning to an already beautiful song?!
The story doesn’t stop there. When he returned to America he settled with his wife in Pennsylvania. They had several more children. Unfortunately another son died. Sadly his church condemned him for the death of his son because of assumed sin in his life. His family left and began a little band of Jesus followers. Spaford was so moved by God’s grace that he took his little group to Jerusalem to serve in that city. They say he served the poor Muslim, Jew and Christian refugees alike with love and compassion. He died in his sixties serving the poor.
I trust in the midst of your hurt that grace will continue to heal and give power to your words!
Well said, Beck. Now, to give it a try… to infuse the writing with the pain of living, and not go overboard, not get maudlin, not laughable, not self-pitying, not gratuitous, but meaningful, on story point… in other words, “Art”. When, in my writing, it happens, I sit back startled, and wonder, “how did I do that?” I’ll be watching for samples as they come in today. And learning!
When you put it that way, it sounds so easy. 😉
I love the startled moments you mention, they are profound and worth the effort! I agree. I hope to hear some amazing examples of pain turned beautiful by a bunch of wonderful practicers!
This is EXACTLY why I didn’t feel confident participating. Well said.
Well said and beautiful!
Great article! I guess I recently experienced something like this when I read and watched The Hunger Games. Specifically the part where Rue dies and Katniss covers her body in flowers. It’s so sad yet so beautiful. But I’m still trying to figure out how to do this in my own writing.
I haven’t read The Hunger Games but I’ve heard it definitely delves into the human condition. Sometimes it’s hard to do in our own writing. Either because our own pain hits too close to home and it’s hard to be that vulnerable or maybe it’s hard to see our own experiences as profound and worth sharing. I imagine as you practice you will find that balance, I think it can add a great credibility and depth to our writing!
Beck, your writing is always moving no matter the subject. “It Is Well With My Soul” is a favorite hymn of mine since the days I attended church with my grandmother. And once you know the story behind it, it is greater comfort than ever before. Thanks for sharing that story for everyone to read.
The memoir I’m drafting deals with the pain of a childhood filled with upheaval due to an emotionally and verbally abusive mother. I do have difficulty writing about the times that her words cut through my heart, or the belt stung my legs. But the whole point behind my writing this book, and my two blogs, is to help others find a way out of a similar situation or to heal the invisible scars left behind for so many years.
Draft excerpts of my memoir are at http://ltrstomama.wordpress.com. The letters to my mother are an attempt to give my inner child a voice she never had. Children are not allowed to counter their parents on issues of discipline or treatment, or they weren’t when I was growing up. I hope to include these letters in my memoir.
My other blog, http://sowingseedsofgrace.wordspress.com, is my expression of the gifts God gave me in spite of myself and others. The hope that rests in Him is for everyone who will accept it. In the end, His grace healed my relationship with my mother, but all too late.
Always the encourager! Sherrey I’ve been touched to see you on this journey of healing. I think your voice has changed since I’ve been reading to a stronger more hopeful one. I have no doubt that there are many who have experienced neglect and abuse in their childhood and it’s a gift you offer others as you yourself continue to heal!
On the sixth anniversary of her death, he found himself finally able to reflect without his mind fluttering like a panicked bird with a broken wing.
Following the ambulance to the hospital that newly dawning day, his breathing harsh and shallow, he’d felt tiny beads of sweat at his hairline. But as he went through the process, meeting with the doctor who put his arm around him and told him there was no hope, that even if she should wake up she wouldn’t be herself as they’d known her, waiting those interminable hours outside the ICU, calling friends, family, her ex-husbands to give them a chance to come and say good-bye, accepting and giving condolences — and this is what it had taken the passage of six years to fully admit to himself — there had been a sneaking sense of relief.
Relief for her, yes, because her suffering would soon be over, but for himself too, because he would soon be able to let fall away the ostensible role of husband and provider, which he knew he had not filled at all satisfactorily. Falling in love with someone does not necessarily or naturally translate into the unobstructed growth of family, and as the seven years of their marriage had progressed, he had slowly and painstakingly earned the suspicion, dislike and even contempt of some family members. Humiliating as it had been, it was a relief to admit his failures, without feeling any need to apologize for them.
Remembering back to what would be his last conversation with her that night, he would have given anything to go back and say the things he had not said, to somehow force himself to love her with the same ardor as at the first — but that was no good, it wouldn’t have worked, and time goes back for no one, not for any reason.
He remembered that she’d given him an out, way back there at the very first: “I love you, and if this is just a transitional thing so be it . . . ” Looking back now he wished he’d taken the out she’d offered, instead of protesting that he was in for the duration. It would have been better for the both of them . . .
But then again, he’d been a pretty good soldier through her amputations, the low blood sugar episodes, the 9-1-1- calls, the dialysis — they had soldiered on to the last together, and that must count for something.
This is so sweet, John
Moving.
That was amazing John! I love the first sentence it captured me right away. I think soldiering on does count for something and I think there are a lot of people that can relate to early love turning into dutiful soldiering.
Wow, there’s so much emotion hugging the different sentences….well done. And great descriptions….fluttering like a panicked bird, falling in love with someone does not necessarily or naturally translate into, and they had soldiered on to the last together. Gifted words painting pain.
I like how this is written in a way that the reader can hear what happened and imagine how the character feels. You do a good job of not telling us how he feels but leading us to imagine for ourselves how he feels. Thanks
…………something I’d not even been aware I was doing — just trying to strike that balance Beck wrote of. Thank you!
Such insightful writing.
This shows the conflicted relationship so well. Somehow, it’s harder to let go when there is so much ambivalence isn’t there?
If I were to go back and edit, I’d add more dialogue in the second paragraph, and in that last conversation.
There is an interesting bit about calling her ex-husbands… so he wasn’t the only one? It made me wonder who SHE was?
………..She was a unique and loving and fascinating person, worthy of further description in my writing. Thanks!
I’m glad that despite the failures, you do end up remembering your soldiering on through it all. Who is without failure? I am sure that you’re being beside her despite all the shortcomings you felt in yourself, was a comfort to her and should bring you some peace.
Great post, Beck! I love that song and the story behind it. Songs (stories and novels too) always mean so much more when you know what went into writing them.
I used to sing “It is Well with My Soul’ in church, never thinking much about the message or the meaning. I was young, and life was a pretty smooth flight, with only occasional bouts of turbulence.
I learned the story behind the song when I was a young bride, taking off on a new kind of flight, a ride filled with a husband, two healthy daughters and a community of loving family and friends. I sang “It is Well with My Soul” in church with increased appreciation, and occasional apprehension.
I admired Horatio’s firm grasp on God’s presence, power and peace, even as sorrows like sea billows rolled over him. I was thankful he had the strength of faith to hold onto to keep him from sinking. I was thankful he was the author of the hymn, and all I had to do was sing the words every so often in church.
It was that very song that God put in my heart the minute our van came to rest in an alfalfa field after our rear right wheel delaminated, which sent my daughter and I crashing through a fence and rolling 4 times.
It was those very same words that God placed in my mind for me to grab hold of to keep me from sinking when mine was the only voice in the wreckage. It was the history of those words and the hope an every-present God that kept me from false hope during all those hours when nobody answered my questions about my daughter’s condition.
It is the very same Lord Who Horatio wrote about, Who we sing about, Who gives me the ability to continue and actually enjoy this flight of life I am on, despite the sea billows, life turbulence and car crashes.
I have yet to be able to actually sing those words in the 5 years since our daughter died in that crash, because in all honesty, it is not yet well with my soul. But God has been faithfully tender and surprisingly sweet, and I’ll keep holding on to Him. I trust Him and I thank Him, for being a God who will sing those words for me.
There could be no more painful experience than to lose a child, and yet you wrote it in a way that still allowed me to read all the way to the last word. Well done. And my sympathies….
Thank you Yvette….people often say ‘ I just can’t imagine…’ – and I say, actually, I can’t either, and I’m living it…but I’m not doing it alone. God has – and is – literally walking with me, and often carrying me, through this journey of grief. He is also growing me in deeper ways.
Honestly and movingly written. I am sorry for your loss and amazed at such a sustaining faith.
Thank you John…it’s been amazing to see that the truths I’d always heard about God…really are true.
Cindy, thank you for sharing your heartrending, tender story. Pain in God’s hand is never wasted. I knew there would be stories that were hard to read. As a mommy reading of your hurt brought tears to my eyes. But your faith offered up to God is a beautiful gift.
Your last line made me think of Zephaniah 3:17 “For the Lord your God is living among you. He is a mighty savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.” I pray you will indeed be able to sing that song with him again one day. In the meantime keep on letting him sing over you!
Thank you Beck, and I so appreciate the reminder of Zephaniah 3:17….we sing a song with that verse at church and I’ve never thought how it applies to God singing over me in my pain….thank you!
I was instantly interested in your writing because of the title ‘Don’t waste your pain’. I often say that God doesn’t waste our pain – it becomes part of our story that He uses to reach others and point them to Him. As we reach out and share our hope with others, God brings more healing to us.
My pleasure Cindy! That passage is one of my most favorite and always astonishes me when I imagine the sound of God’s song sung over his dear ones.
Oh Cindy, I’m so sorry … and I’m happy to hear of such wonderful and enduring faith .
I can’t imagine anything worse than losing a child. You wrote that very well, clearly and I particularly love this “Who gives me the ability to continue and actually enjoy this flight of life I am on, despite the sea billows, life turbulence and car crashes”. It was sad but showed a great deal of God given strength. Well done.
Cindy, thank you for you honesty and for exposing us to a grieving mothers pain. In my opinion your admission that it is not yet well with your soul is much more relatable than Spafford’s well loved hymn. But I was also encouraged by your use on the word, “yet.”. That’s where you show us your abiding faith. That’s where you live in hope.
Cindy,
I can’t even imagine. Your writing is heartbreaking and so honest.
Thank you for sharing Cindy. It’s the sentence “it is not YET well” that clinches everything together. Still we hurt, and it is well because we know there will be and end to the YET.
My heart goes out to you. Your eloquence has quite obviously touched us all. You have most ably shown how even a deep-seated pain does not preclude faith, but can even strengthen it. May the Lord bring you comfort, and may you know no more pain.
Thank you Mirelba, God has shown a deep and tender sweetness through this pain that I never knew before, and I have seen that when I share His hope with others, I seem to receive some healing salve myself.
Beautiful/heartbreaking… gives me the courage to write about my own pain which has never been the pain I fear the most… the pain you write of. “I was thankful he was the author of the hymn, and all I had to do was sing the words every so often in church.” A line so true. A line I am now thinking of in response to your story. Love and light to you. Thank you for being brave enough to share.
Some of the best stuff I’ve ever written came from when I’d been hurt. Writing became a coping mechanism I guess. When you pour the pieces of you that feel hurt onto the page, it seems to almost come alive. It’s a very calming feeling.
Nice job, Beck. A writing course I did in 2010, the teacher, Joy Cowley said, that she can tell right away when a writer is venting, rather than creating. She suggested that this is why diaries are crucial for writers, because we need to stream our pain, our frustrations on to paper in harmless form (like diaries, or brainstorming) first, before we try to write fiction. Then we can use our experiences to infuse, and fuel the emotions of our characters.
Thanks Yvette. I love that advice it rings so true. We know immediately when an author is venting or creating. I like the suggestion of journaling. Not everything is appropriate for public consumption but we need to handle and express our pain before it useful sometimes. Thanks for sharing that.
Hi, I loved your post, thank you. I will now make an attempt to do the practice.
She sat in a room, staring at a white wall. She felt as if the walls were caving in on her.
Suffocating… much like her life had become. Lonely and unhappy. No one who understands her. Except for the birds facing a large open window. Stuck in a cage, wishing they were free to roam the sky and earth.
But they were trapped, much like she is. Trapped within four white walls. Bland and dull. No hint of color or life.
She sits there staring. Empty and alone. Wishing she could be set free and fly once again.
Thank you Pilar. I can feel the heaviness in your words and description. Feeling trapped is so miserable and a feeling I know that is all to common for many women.
This is so stark and colorless. It really creates the feeling you are describing of being trapped no where to go nothing to explore no life. Your simple unadorned writing it perfect for this idea.
Very true. All the writing I do, in one way or another, comes from my pain. The message may not always comment directly on that fact, but it’s there.
I have two blogs, one is an offering of lessons I’ve in life…most of which were born of pain, and the second is about the antics of my dog, the posts for which are generated by a different sort of pain ;-), LOL.
You’re welcome to take a peak…
http://anextraordinaryeverydayordinary.blogspot.com/
http://www.thecarmiechronicles.com
Thanks!
Here’s my practice:
It took three people to get me to the bathroom.
I was nineteen years old, and I’d been going to the bathroom alone since I was toilet trained 17 1/2 years earlier. But now my muscles had abandoned me, and all control and tone was gone. I needed these people to help me stand, to support me as I shuffled on the tile floor, and to help lower me to the seat so I wouldn’t freefall and bruise myself–or worse, break something.
I am a college student, I thought. I am a double-major. And I can’t go to the bathroom by myself.
I couldn’t do much else either–sit in a chair for longer than five minutes, move a pillow that was stuck under my shoulder blade independently. I couldn’t eat more than a few bites. I had, recently, begun to breathe on my own, so that was a step forward.
After two weeks flat on my back, my body had abandoned me.
It had begun so innocently. I had just begun my sophomore year of college. It was homecoming weekend, a big one for me , with our first choir concert of the season, the Homecoming festival, the footblal game, and, of course, the dance that night. I had a long, wine-colored velvet dress decorated small sparkly detail that began at the hem and followed the slit up my leg, ending at the beginning of my thigh. My fiance had come from his school, an hour away, to attend the festivities with me. We were going to a local steakhouse for dinner.
I thought it was just a cold, like everyone on my floor and in my classes had that fall. It was shortly after 9/11, and we all had bigger things to worry about than classes and colds, but somehow everything continued to go on, even as we watched the Afghan war on our dorm room TVs. Homecoming weekend was going to be a sign of the return to normalcy.
I should have known a cold wasn’t just a cold for me. I had cystic fibrosis, and a cold could be serious, since it led to more mucus production in my body, and mucus–that seemingly innocuous substance–was what led to lung infection, lung scarring, and, possibly, death, if the disesase progressed that far. I knew what the disease could do. But I couldn’t be sick now–I was too busy–and thought I’d see what happened after this weekend. If I had to see my doctor, I’d call on Monday, when everything was over.
I sang in the concert. I manned my sorority’s table at the festival, we went to the game, and to dinner. My fiance loved my dress, and at the dance we had our photograph taken and danced to, appropriately, “Lady in Red.” The campus dining room was splendidly decorated, and we had great time.
The next morning, I woke up with pain in my shoulder blade and in my abdomen. I knew it was pancreatitis, a troublesome problem that meant hospitalization, IVs for hydration and pain meds, and a week without food. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was a pain.
Mark drove me to the ER, his knuckles white on the wheel–he’d never had to do this before. I was calm, because this wasn’t new to me. I’d been going to ERs frequently in my life; I was a frequent flier at the local Children’s Hospital, where my CF clinic was.
I remember going into the ER parking lot.
And then I don’t remember anything for the next two weeks.
The cold I had was a life-threatening infection that only one other person in the world had ever had. I was put in a medically-induced coma to attempt to keep my body stable while my doctors worked frantically to figure out what the mystery bug was; at one point, they even considered anthrax, which was de rigeur at that time. Some of the doctors told Mark and my family that I would most likely die.
I didn’t die. I woke up on All Saints’ Day, November 1st, extubated, with a sore throat and IVs and deep vein lines poked in me everywhere, like an eccentric voodoo doll. I even had a line in my jugular vein. Bruises pocked my arms.
My engagement ring was gone. I was a bit frantic about that, until a nurse told me that they took if off so that they wouldn’t have to cut it off as my body swelled. Mark produced it from a small plastic bag in his wallet. Even though my sensese were dulled due to the medication, my heart lurched at the image of the nurses taking off my ring, putting it in that bag, and handing it to Mark. He must have been terrified.
I floated in and out of consciousness for a few days, until I was able to sit up for a few minutes on my own, and breathe normally. I had missed my sister’s birthday, and Halloween, in my coma.
I was transfered to the regular pulmonary floor. Here, I was allowed to do things like “sit up” and need a team of nurses to take me to the bathroom. I had the muscle strength of Raggedy Ann.
How quickly the body abandons us! How tenuous is our grasp on independence. Part of my physical therapy was stretching exercises, simple things like reaching my arms above my head. The pain–from the scar tissue, the two chest tubes, and the IVs–was so great I could bearely hold the position for four seconds. Something that a baby could do was beyond my capabilities.
I couldn’t wash my hair, so the nurses had to do it, and even that was a painful process, since I couldn’t really move my neck. If my muscles weren’t weak, they were seized with inactivity, and moving them was like trying to manipulate rock.
One night, after a trip to the bathroom, part of my right lung collapsed. If you’ve ever read the book “A Fish Out of Water”, you know how I felt. I could not get any air. My favorite nurse tried to keep me calm, and eventually I was given a shot and didn’t know anything else, until several hours later, when I dimly noticed a doctor–one of my favorites–telling me to turn on my side.
The collapse was another step back. Therapy was hard already, and with another chest tube, movement on my right side was almost impossible. Even today, that side lacks flexibility and deep waves of pain can come from simple movements.
Your description is astounding. You capture this so profoundly. I’m running out of words.
Oh my, I think I was holding my breath as I read! My favorite line is “How quickly the body abandons us!” So true. The way you tell your story is an interesting combination of emotion and matter of fact reality. I like the tone, it kept me from getting bogged down in heavy emotion but attached enough to care and want to know more. Apparently you recovered! I hope you are doing well today.
What great writing, so clear and detailed. I like the part about the ring in the baggy and being like a voodoo doll full of lines and tubes. Great writing.
Thanks Beck! I love your writing.
Here you go:
It is the night of the Blue Moon and I could see it if the rains
from Hurricane Isaac weren’t falling across Arkansas. It’s a slow steady rain, the kind we’ve
dreamed of all summer while the crops turned brown and the ponds dried up.
But tonight the rain has hidden the lunar wonder, and I am in Eureka
Springs, a beautiful little town of clear springs that are tucked off the meandering
streets in little grottos where the sick still come to dip the water.
I am so high up in the hills that the clouds are just above me. I look up and the white waves drift across the
top of the four-story Crescent Hotel, a limestone wonder of a building built in
the 1860s, and for a minute the purple chimneys that jut across the roofline
disappear.
The elevators are out so I climb the stairs, past the dining
room where chandeliers shine across the silver water pictures, and on up to the
fourth floor where a middle-aged woman named Tilda, dressed in a black dress
that trails behind her, reaches out the touch my hand. She has a tattoo that looks like a Celtic cuff
that covers half her forearm and ends in a point in the middle of her right
hand.
“You’re here for the ghosts,” Tilda says, and I hand her my
press creditials.
“I am,” I say.
“A good night,” she says.
“The rain,” she adds, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Are you a fainter?” she asks, and I shake my head no.
“Good,” she says, and starts her spiel.
The hotel is alive with ghosts, Tilda claims, including an Irish
teen named Michael, a stonemason who helped build the Crescent. He’d just come
back from the White River, where he’d been gathering limestone for the
hotel. He climbed the scaffolding and
was standing on a crossbeam between earth and sky when he saw a beauty of girl
below. He reached out to wave, to call
attention to himself, and he slipped.
Tilda points to a black door for Room 419, painted so many times
no wood grain is visible beneath the thick coats. “There were no walls up yet, but he died right
there,” she says, and I jot down the room number.
“He still likes the ladies,” she says, and then laughs. “Men
complain that they feel someone pushing them out of bed at night. And women, lonely women of a certain age,”
she says, and looks over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses at me,
“who’ve seen Michael’s picture – he was a gorgeous boy – ask to stay here. Sometimes he shows himself to them, an
eternal teen, still on the prowl, still looking for love, or at least a
connection with the female flesh.”
It is a sweltering night, despite the rain, and the mist seems
to have invaded the halls of the Crescent, making the air wavy and unreliable. A woman, who’s maybe twenty-five or thirty,
walks past us, and she has the kind of walk that makes you look down to make
sure her feet are touching the floor.
She is pale, and her dress is a little flowered number, with a stiff
cotton belt, and her hair is pulled back in a tight bun.
With the story of the Romeo ghost out of the way, Tilda gets
down to business.
“The Crescent was once the Grand Lady of the Ozarks, and only
the richest of the rich stayed here.” She opens her thick binder and hands over
a copy of a guest list, the ornate writing that looks like an art project.
“You had to be invited,” she says. “Servants came with them, and we’re right
here,” she says, and points to a short hall, “where the servants stayed.
“But I need to take you back further. I need to take you to the days of Norman
Baker, the charlatan who came here claiming to cure cancer, after the Crescent
fell out of favor as a world-class resort.”
I cringe at the word cancer.
If I could take one word out of our vocabulary, it would be cancer.
“He bought it outright.
He built an office down there,” she says, and again she points. “Right above the morgue, it was, and there
was a hexagonal desk, and he kept two machine guns with him in there, and two
armed guards stood outside his door, and a false wall was behind his desk with
a ladder behind it, so he could escape to the roof if his enemies came after
him.” She pauses. “So many people hated
him. Families of the dead, mostly.”
“So, he haunts this place?” I ask.
“Oh, heavens no,” Tilda says.
“After he left federal prison, after the feds came and ripped
him from the lobby and accused him of mail fraud for sending letters to the
dying telling them he could cure them of cancer, he headed to Florida where he
lived on a three-story yacht, and drank quite a bit. So, he’s not here.” She
laughs, a haunting little laugh. “But his patients are, and I like to tell
their spirits that Baker succumbed to cancer.
Poetic justice, don’t you think?”
Tilda takes my elbow and leads me into the hallway. “Stand here,” she says.
There is a chill in this hall, possibly a paranormal chill but
still a small comfort since my heart is pounding now, and I need to cool down.
“Baker filled this hotel with cancer patients. He filled it up, the sick and the dying, he got rich from them, and
he pumped them full of a potion made of watermelon seed and corn silk and
carbolic acid. No radiation, no
surgery. He paved the balconies so their
wheelchairs could roll out there. They
all ended up in wheelchairs.
“But here in these rooms is where he kept the ones who couldn’t
take the pain anymore. He put steel
doors up, and boxed the rooms in steel so the others couldn’t hear their
screams.” Tilda taps her chin and frowns. “He hated complainers.
“So, the ghosts here, oh the sadness of the ghosts here. Room 215, now there’s a room. Honeymooners stay here now. We added the Jacuzzis, so they love it. All that passion,” Tilda says, and laughs a
little nervous twitter.
“And at the witching hour, usually between three and five in the
morning, they’ll hear a gurney with a squeaky wheel, and if they come out here
to look, they’ll see a nurse in her starched whites rolling a body covered in a
blanket down the hall. And then they’ll
hear Baker say, ‘Another one down.’”
I have begun to feel sick.
There is light splintering from both eyes, a sure sign of an impending
migraine, or a ghost, who knows. I have
been doing too many cancer stories lately.
Tilda hands over a photo a honeymooner sent her last year. There is an image in TV, that’s turned off, just
the black screen should be showing, but still the image is there, of a woman
who looks just like the woman I passed in the hall. Same flowered dress, same tight bun.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Don’t delete any of your photos,” she says. “You’ll surely have something in one of them.” She takes out an EMF detector, the same kind
carpenters use to find wires inside walls, and she holds it to the pillar of
the staircase, and it makes the device come alive and blink like a warning
light.
“No wiring in here,” she says, “so it shouldn’t blink. But a
two-year-old who lived here during the Baker years fell from this spot and went
splat two floors below. This is her energy.”
I am a journalist. I
should be asking harder questions. I
should be debunking the pseudo-science behind the parlor trick, but my right eye
is throbbing hard now, and I can feel the patients, their slippered feet
shuffling across the oak floors, and I can hear the screams from the hall where
the sickest stayed.
It’s not much different from my mother’s last days in a hospital
where they came in and plunged needles into her lungs to drain the fluid so she
could suffer for a few more days.
I was so young then. I
don’t think I was ever as young and alone as I was during those months. And I thought, maybe arrogantly, that my own
sin had put her there. I thought if I’d
been better, if I’d rejected the sins of the flesh that fueled me during the
years of her illness, that God would have spared her.
And so I bargained with God.
And I tried to reform, but you try to reform when all you want is
someone healthy to touch you and remind you that your body is strong and your
beauty is irresistible, and if they’ll tell you you’ll never die young, you’ll
be willing to do just about anything to keep them in bed with you.
Which is where I was when she died. Even now it is hard to face, the prodigal
daughter who was there the morning my mother died, and then gone for just two
hours, and how when I walked back in around noon, there was a preacher at her
head, and my father broken, and I was fresh from an unmade bed, where I had
been reborn for an hour, all flesh and fire, and I backed out, unworthy to be
anywhere near their pain.
Tilda is leading me to the old morgue, where Baker’s “meat
locker” held twenty-eight bodies at a time.
The air is damp. The floor is concrete.
The rain is falling.
“Baker was not a doctor,” she says. “But he had a staff of surgeons who did
autopsies here. A TV show came and
caught a ghost on camera a few years back, a man with a fedora. It can get intense in here,” she says, and
then she turns off the light.
She’s placed the EMF meter on the concrete floor, and it’s
blinking, slow and steady. “No wiring in
the floor,” she says, “and limestone underneath. So when this thing blinks it means the
spirits are with us.”
Tilda starts asking questions to the ghost. “Did you die here?”
Blink. Blink. Blink.
“Are there more than five of you?”
Blinkblinkblinkblinkblink.
“Did Norman Baker kill you?”
The meter goes crazy, blinking like the lights on a police car
there on the concrete floor, near the metal prep table where the diseased
organs were examined and then dropped through a hole where they fell to a vat
below.
My head is throbbing now, and the air feels like a coat I can’t
take off. There is more sorrow than I
can bear. I feel the way I did at my
mother’s funeral, when I took so many drugs that I felt like I was floating
near the ceiling. I watched my family from my vantage point,
mourning my mother, and felt, I hate to admit it, embarrassed by the public
display.
When my brother stood and then fell back into the pew, I raised
my hand up to cover my eyes. When my
father, a man I’d only seen cry twice before, dropped across my mother’s coffin
and refused to leave, I turned away and wanted to apologize to the dry-eyed
mourners who only dabbed their eyes for effect.
Tilda speaks. “Time for
lights on,” she says, and she flips a switch, and I push past her without
saying goodbye.
“Careful, dear,” she calls behind me. “These mountain roads are terrible in the
rain. The Victorians built all these
houses and then they came back in and worked the roads around them. It’s like a crazy winding maze.”
I keep moving. My car is
in the parking lot, and I have to pass a wedding party on my way there. A bride is climbing out of a pink limousine,
the tattoos of crosses on each bare shoulder above the field of lace that is
her dress. She has the confidence of a
girl untouched by sorrow, and as she takes her bouquet of gardenias from the
car she catches my eye.
And then she hitches up her gown, lifting it out of the rain
that falls on the limestone walk, and behind her is a heart shaped leaf, blown
in by the storm. She climbs the steps,
her heels clicking on the stone, and heads inside where the ghosts wait, along
with the man she’ll marry, and it is too much for me, the sorrow and the joy,
the beginning and the end, and I want to tell her everything. But what would it matter?
So I head for my car, but I do turn back, just as she’s walking
through the heavy doors, and the light shoots out around her, and the Blue Moon
moves from
from behind the clouds, and she walks into her future as regal
as a queen ascending her throne.
behind the clouds, and she walks into her future as regal as a queen
ascending her throne.
Oh my goodness Marla, your writing is too good, I was freaked out! Way to take a subject and kick it up a notch! Linking pain from the past and present was so clever, it created a whole different dimension.
Thank you Beck. No, not fiction. True story. And the ghosts were nothing compared to the exorcist I interviewed a couple of years ago. Now that was scary!
Wow! I guess real life is stranger than fiction! I am sorry for the pain you’ve experienced. It seems certainly to have shaped your writing, and I think for the better. I hope you think so as well at this point of your life.
Thank you Beck. I love my life, and think God’s been incredibly kind to me. I think everyone has great sorrow, and I’ve been lucky enough to have great joy as well. I’m thankful every day.
And I think your writing is wonderful, Beck.
Wow Marla. This is amazing, the blending of the images of the hotel ghosts and the images like ghosts that she remembers from her mothers death and then that last part about the bride beginning her married life in that hotel haunted by death and illness. I like the paragraph that starts with “And so I bargained with God . . . ” and the last sentence that is repeated with the moon coming though the clouds. Just wonderful as you pieces usually are. It makes me thing about all the imagine/remembered/created people in our heads and how similar to ghosts they are. Thanks
Thank you Marianne. You always see more in my writing than I do, and I so appreciate that.
Ahem, Marla. Wake up! You should show yourself some more respect! I think you have real talent and you should be sending your stuff out, and everyone should be knocking down your doors. IMHO, of course…
I’m butting in and I agree with Mariaanne! Your writing ALWAYS astonishes me. I hope you are submitting your work for publication. I think you have far more raw talent than I’ve ever dreamed of.
Thanks to all the support I’ve gotten here, I did submit one piece. No word yet. We’ll see. You’ve all been so encouraging!
I had someone tell me about a piece of mine once “and the theme of displacement and inequality that you embrace in this” or something along those lines. I had just written a story about two people and was surprised at what he saw there, so i know what you mean. I think sometimes things just “come out” as we write and those themes really are in the work but not because we “intentionally” put them there but because they are in our subconscious waiting to get out. You are an excellent writer and your topics or themes or whatever we want to call them certainly appeal to me and it looks like a whole lot of people here agree.
I agree.
Amazing! You always get it all across so well, and always keep the story lines. Your writing is always so impressive! And I have to wake up in another 4 hours, so I really have to go to sleep!
Thank you so much! I thought this one might be a little too “straight on.”
Sleep well!
I’ve been debating what to write about since I read this prompt. After all, everyone has their moments of pain. But tonight when I tossed and turned in bed this came to me, and there went bed time…
When she was 14 and a bit, the Nazis entered her town and
destroyed her life as she knew it.
Within a few short weeks, she was moved from her warm, spacious home, to
a noisy crowded ghetto, then a stark over-crowded brick factory, then a suffocatingly
close cattle car and then within three days, Auschwitz. Within minutes, she gained two years and her
life, while her mother was taken away with her three young brothers who could not even
pretend to be sixteen, and were turned into ashes. Ashes which settled into her eyes, her lungs,
her soul. Ashes which seared her heart
for all the years afterwards.
She was not allowed to feel pain. Pain is a luxury which gets in the way of
survival. When your survival for another
day, another hour, another minute is in question, giving way to pain turns the
question into a moot point. It leads one
to the electric wires, and then there are no more questions.
Only later–after the camp, and the death march, and the
next camp, and the next death march—only after the liberation and the rape by
the Soviet liberators, only then when she was still half a year away from her
sixteenth birthday, only then was there time to feel pain.
During the year of
the great pain, she swore that she would never bring children into this dark and
dreary world. She buried her heart
beneath the layers of pain and hoped to lose it there.
And then, a letter arrived from abroad, a letter from a doctor
cousin to a G.I., a former patient, and she was whisked across the lines soon
to be set into a curtain of iron. She
was shipped along with other orphans in a ship floating on pain to a lady that
held her beacon aloft for all to see and greeted them with her comforting gaze.
She was succored by the-words of the poem that she felt but did not yet know. As she began her new life, the pain was
assuaged but never really disappeared.
I was born to the newfound joy, and the buried pain. I grew up witness to them both from an early age. Along with Mother Goose and nursery rhymes, I
imbibed the vibrations of Hitler and hate, loss and pain. They were my heritage from the day I was born
seared onto my soul along with my grandmother’s name. My mother did not want to share her past,
she would tell me other stories to keep away the night. And yet, growing up I often dreamt her
dreams. It was I in the death march that
she never spoke about. It was I pushed
away from my mother’s arms. The pain has
survived into another generation. A pain that I cannot speak of, for it is a
pain that my mother wanted to spare her children. And I am her daughter, I cannot add to her
pain. There are enough Ahmadinejads to
do that.
I really don’t know what to say. Certainly thank you, thank you for sharing with us such a powerful story. I knew there would be great pieces shared but I had no idea to what depths of fragile beauty they would reach. Your description was as beautifully poetic as it was horrifyingly painful. The connection you drew to the generations who are shaped by their parents pain was perfect.
Thank you. Once I got out of bed, it just spilled out of me. My parents’ Holocaust experiences were a major influence on me and had a lot to do with choices I’ve made and the person I’ve become. Not unusual among children of survivors. There are even influences on the next generation, since survivors often find it easier to talk to grandchildren rather than children about their experiences.
Mirelba,
I am broken by this. Such graceful writing, and such great sorrow. Thank you for sharing this.
Marla
Sounds weird to say, but maybe Holocaust writing should be my niche. But who wants to read about it? They were such oppressive times. However, even among those terrible times, there were moments of great and subtle beauty, mostly when people managed to rise above the situation and retain their humanity. While it doesn’t take away from the horror, I hear those stories as well, and it keeps one from giving up on the human race 🙂
” My mother did not want to share her past, she would tell me other stories to keep away the night. And yet, growing up I often dreamt her dreams.” WOW. Powerful.
Thanks, they were powerful dreams. I still remember one of them vividly: after more than 40 years it still haunts me. On a brighter note, I think that the pain we go through, can help us appreciate the good things, the happiness in life all the more.
Great post Beck … you have outlined the task of using one’s pain to inspire the written word perfectly. Through music and poetry many have spilled their hearts out for all to hear and share … your example is one of many … I immediatley thought of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” … so poignant a piece I’ve teared up many times while enjoying that one. The examples in literature are everywhere, we all have our favorites and why are they so enjoyable … I dunno, but I’m sure it’s the relatable nature of the stories that we connect with that keep us on edge waiting to turn the page …
I think for some of us the pain is very deep and well, painful, maybe too painful to spill out in all it’s graphic nature … I’ve been working on a fifteen minute soliloquy but cannot bring it to paper as yet … still trying but thanks for the prompt …
Thanks Robert! You bring up a couple of good points. This song is just one of many, very many, examples of people expressing their pain in a meaningful way that connects deeply with others.
Another good point is that often our pain is still too fresh to be used well. I think in those times doing what you have done is so healthy. Writing, naming, handling, and processing that pain so that maybe in the future it has been tamed enough to be useful. I think a wise writer knows when a painful experience isn’t ready to be shared. Sometimes pain has to age and brew in our hearts until the bitter sting has been tempered and a poignant sorrow remains.
I think too that the experience of pain can creep into our writing and lend credibility with our writers even when not specifically expressed.
I am writing about not wasting our pain. Here is my story.
For many years I had a pain in my whole body that felt like a toothache. One day I remembered taking my son school shopping . I was trying some clothes on while waiting for my son to finish his shopping.
As I raised my arms up it felt like my shoulder became dislocated and there was a grinding sound with it. That was the end of our shopping and we headed for the ER. By the time I was seen by the doctor I was feeling better. I was sent home without any X-ray and toward to relax. The doctors attitude was that I was just imagining the pain.
This took place in the 1980’s and had all kinds of test and it was not until 1994 that I finally got a name for my pain. Within 15 minutes seeing a doctor who recognized and accepted the illness of fibromylgia he told me that is what I had.
Even though I still had the pain I now had a name for it and I could learn about it and know how to help myself. I joined a support group and became a co-director of the group. I also researched medical journals and they were placed in the hospital’s library.
So work with the pain and it is great when you can help others to learn about how you cope with the pain.
Thanks for writing this article. Also one of my favorite songs is It Is Well With My Soul.
I still have pain every day but I have learned how to cope with it. When it gets real bad I just stop what I am doing and rest.
The loss of a loved one is immeasurable, and I remember fondly the days my little sister and I would tell secrets as we went to sleep. I loved having her stay with my husband and I her first year in college. I loved it when after her second child was born, she would call me in the early hours of the morning for advice. I never dreamed she would leave us so suddenly, and how altered our lives would now be. So I’ve been having a little conversation with God about losing someone way too soon, and leaving so many things for so many years out of our control. Almost 20 years later, we realize too well the tangled webs life sometimes weaves, and the silent, unavoidable ripples, from one tragic event, that go on and on, like throbbing echoes heard through a dark canyon. We travel on, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not so much, ever working to find our way. When seemingly out of nowhere, in an unexpected moment, the once distant sound of that unwelcome echo suddenly starts ringing in our ear. Quickly, we take captive our thoughts that want to linger. We remind ourselves that every day is a new day, and regret is not our friend. We make a choice to take those obstacles of pain, hurt, and what would have, could have, should have been, and we replace them with stepping stones that will get us to the other side of pain. They will lead to a place of peace we never would have searched for, and a place of serving others instead of needing to be served. We choose to be a victor and not a victim. With a smile on our face and a song in our heart we hold tight to the torch that has been placed in our hand. With faith, boldness and courage, we run with it. It is a representation of purpose, hope, and a loved ones dream we won’t let die. When the sun shines we embrace the warmth it brings, and when it rains we wrap ourselves in a blanket of gratitude and expectation of things that will soon blossom. Suddenly we are overcome with a gift, an unexpected sense of blessing. Many blessings. We try to count them, but they are just as the ripples and the echo, they go on and on. We are assured we have nothing to fear. Instead, we have a clarion call to make a difference, to encourage, to speak words of life, and to listen, giving compassion and grace to another soul who is simply looking for hope.
Beautifully written, Beck, as always. Not only do you provide great wisdom and practical advice in not wasting your pain, you inspired some tremendous stories in the comments. Thanks for the always humbling reminder that no matter my lot, all can be well with my soul.
So does God painfully push the envelope just so he can see how much people will really say it is well with my soul? So he can get all the glory ? At your expense? It’s like an ego trip but he doesn’t need us, he’s good without us. So why ? Your family is dead but it’s well? No obviously it is not well if your children or spouse die. That’s ignorant and ignoring the problem. It has to go deeper here. If God gave me ultimate peace, and I knew they were okay with him I would probably be alright. But wow, I cannot even imagine. Bad things happen true, God is good. And in light of eternity we will be reunited. But it won’t be well for a little bit being realistic.